Jag Mundhra's Hack-O-Lantern (seriously) A 1988 slasher film. A whole other realm of "holy shit, I can't believe this exists" bad. It's not on DVD but it is astonishing. Basically, a weird creepy grandpa character inducts his grandson into a cult and when the kid becomes a young man, he's supposed to complete his initiation by...I don't know...killing a lot of people I guess. He does this while wearing a dimestore Halloween Satan getup. This film has four things going for it. 1. It's Jag Mundhra, so it's lecherous. A good bit of skin here. 2. The actor playing the granda character. He's what happens when you cross Harvey Fierstein with a psycho, redneck rapist from Deliverance. He's fun to watch, but likely not in the way the filmmakers intended. 3. A dream sequence that is literally a music video. I'm too lazy to look up whether the band was legit or not, but the gist of it is that the lead character, the kid who becomes a Satanic killer, has a dream where this horrendously shitty metal band jams out an entire song that I assume is called "(You're) The Devil's Son" since it's the chorus. Laser beam eyes, shredding, a black woman in a loincloth who I guess is supposed to represent Khali(!), I don't know...it's hilarious. 4. This I'm slightly ambivalent about, but it really shows how bad the film is. At one point, during a Halloween party, a guy in a crowd of people tells a completely unfunny joke. He continues this for four to five fucking minutes. They actually have some horrendously shitty comedian, who has nothing to do with the plot, essentially do a set in the middle of a horror film. It's stunning and awful. My theory? The band and the comic have the same manager, and he's one of the producers. Seek it out.
Also, to anyone who is curious about seeing Final Exam (1981), just know that the only thing that film has going for it outside of that early 80's ambiance that I love so dearly, is perhaps one of the single most unconvincing heterosexual crushes in film history. Joel S. Rice, the actor who plays the true crime obsessed nerd, Radish, pines for our final girl, boringly essayed by Cecile Bagdadi, but Rice is so obviously gay, like napalm gay, that it is mystifying how the filmmakers thought they could sell this. Personally, I would rather have seen a version of the film where Radish pined for a final boy, it would have been way more interesting. By the way, the trailer has the line "the night he came back" or somesuch shit, clearly a riff on Halloween's tagline. What's funny is that the killer, who was probably a grip or something, is not only boring and nondescript, but there's no story to him. He randomly shows up and begins killing people. Radish opines about the randomness of crime, and there's a vaguely clever number scheme going on, and all that, but it's really in the service of making the least complex, easiest to shoot product, and it's a snooze.
Edited by JacknifeJohnny - 2/22/11 at 4:00pm
