Tom DeSimone

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2020) Look, I’m more eager than most to watch a horror film in which characters must spend the night in a haunted mansion, but I’ll sneak out the moment it becomes a slasher. Alas, Hell Night came out in 1981, when there was scarcely any place left in theatres for non-slasher horror… so here we have a slasher. Nothing fancy: A group of pledges, a vast decrepit house and a killer repeating a spree killing. It starts promisingly (and Linda Blair does look very cute costumed as a Red Riding Hood) and then sustains its interest for a while as pranks substitute for real killings. But then the real killings start. While acceptably competent for a film of its subgenre, Hell Night is still quite dull. Whatever it thinks are innovations are mere variations, and it takes a slasher fan to appreciate the rest. Still, I’ll allow that as far as slashers go (and early-1980s exploitation slashers in particular), Hell Night is better than most. Whether or not that’s enough depends on your tolerance for them.

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2021) Regurgitated from the lowest depths of the slasher craze of the early 1980s, Hell Night is about as ordinary an example of the subgenre as you can get. The good news is that it could have been much worse – there’s no real bottom to the quality of the time’s slashers, although time has a tendency to filter out the worst. But neither is Hell Night clever, witty or even interesting. One of the few flickers of interest has the dull killer-killing-coeds plot being set in an expansive manor during a costume party, bringing some gothic elements to the result. There’s also horror icon Linda Blair looking as cute as any final girl can look as she runs from the crazed killer in an extended, almost exhausting finale. But that’s roughly it for the compliments, and they’re slim distinctions in a corrupt subgenre that is happy re-creating the same highlights in one movie after another. Hell Night doesn’t do much to distinguish itself throughout much of its running time: college-age characters, spooky setting, flashes of titillating sex scenes, false scares and gory deaths. The cast is slowly whittled down to one, and then it’s off to the credits. Director Tom DeSimone doesn’t do all that badly, balancing some atmosphere in between the violence. Still, Hell Night is the kind of film that only slasher fans will enjoy – it doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the clichés of the genre, and seems satisfied merely showing up.  (So why did I see it a second time, you ask?  Here’s the final condemnation: I forgot I had seen it before and wrote the review before realizing it was already in the database.)