You'd think with the freedom to do whatever, more or less, in an R-rated movie that a TV-movie would be easy to top, but you'd be wrong. That said, if there was one format that was even more derided than a TV-movie back then, it was the dreaded "made for home video" flick. We're talking no-budget, oft-shot-on-videotape travesties that look cheap and are almost-always painfully inept, such as Houseboat Horror, Blood Lake, Video Dead, Blood Cult, Boardinghouse, Sledgehammer and plenty more where that came from. (Here's a handy list of some of them, for those who dare to fall down this particular rabbit hole.)
The trend started in the early 80's, when VHS was all the rage, and one could make a fast buck in quick order by shooting one of these microbudget travesties. The approach was dead in the water by the early 2000's, as DVD put VHS out of business, but filmmakers still do it, albeit with way better quality, thanks to digital video. Back in the day, you could usually pick these sorts of films out from the pack from a mile away, just by looking at the cover or the film stills on the back or what have you, but it's a bit harder to tell nowadays, where even the worst of the bunch looks better than a lot of the direct-to-VHS stuff back then, and you can only see the poster art to help you choose, which can often be deceptively cool. (That much, at least, hasn't changed.)
Two such films are the ones I have for you today. Though made in 2009, well after the direct-to-VHS rush, HalloweeNight - their spelling, not mine- does indeed look like one of those gloriously cheesy, shot-on-videotape pseudo-treasures. BTW, that curious spelling made it a bitch to find info about online, as there's an Asylum movie by the same name- only with the extra, completely valid "N"- released the following year. I had to look up the actors just to find this one and there wasn't much in the way of info about it, so yeah, not much I can tell you about its origins.
About all I do know is that that missing "N" was, of course, intentional, as apparently, even then there were several other movies with the title Halloween Night, so they adopted the wacky spelling in order to stand out from the pack; which, of course, didn't help matters for me when I was trying to find more info on this one. It doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, so yeah, not much to say on the background. Sorry. 😒
The film was written and directed by Pennsylvania-based filmmaker Mark Polonia, and based on a story by his late twin brother John, who sadly died the year before the film was released. John actually came up with the idea way back in 1984, and Mark completed it for him and dedicated the film to his memory. The two wrote, directed, edited, produced and often acted in over 20 horror movies together, with titles such as Splatter Farm, Hellspawn, Feeders and its sequel, Slay Bells; The House That Screamed and its sequel, Hellgate; Peter Rottentail, Splatter Beach and my favorite title of the bunch, Gorilla Warfare: Battle of the Apes.
And speaking of The Asylum, Mark Polonia has done his fair share of rip-off titles looking to hook fans of a certain franchise, including no less than three (!) Amityville-inspired horror flicks: Amityville Death House, Amityville Exorcism and Amityville Island- that are in no way, shape or form part of the better-known franchise in question, aside from tangential relations to the town and their revolving around spooky stuff. One of them (Island) even features a possessed shark, making for a bit of a Amityville/Jaws combo! Hey, lest we forget, Jaws was set in Amity.
Other also-rans include Chainsaw Killer, Empire of the Apes and Revolt of the Empire of the Apes; Jurassic Prey, Camp Blood- First Slaughter and Ghost of Camp Blood; Sharkenstein, Bigfoot vs. Zombies, Bride of the Werewolf and my fave title, Shark Encounters of the Third Kind. All of 'em sound like the kind of thing I would have rented back in the day before I was too young to know better, but I would soon learn the hard way to be more discerning about such things on down the line. Kind of.
I'm sure Polonia is a lovely guy, though, and probably a lot of fun to be around, in a sort of pseudo Ed Wood sort of way, in spite of the overall silliness of his films. Believe you me, if I could make a living wage making cut-rate horror films with microbudgets, I would be doing that now, grumpy critics be damned. After all, just as they say those who can't do, teach; so it is true that those who can't make films, often end up critiquing them. Case in point: 👉 this guy. 👈
Anywho, HalloweeNight (that title just doesn't get any easier to type) revolves around a put-upon janitor at a local college, "Creepy" Harold (Polonia regular Todd Carpenter), who has just finished putting up his Halloween decorations when some "young"- and I use that term WAAAAY loosely- hooligans come by and trash his yard and beat him up. One of the morons leaves his wallet behind, thus making it that much easier for Harold to track him down, though he needn't have worried, as one of the more sympathetic local college girls, Trixie (Cindy Wheeler, also of Camp Blood- First Slaughter), invites him to the party that the same thugs are throwing, or at the very least, attending.
Harold works his magical mojo on the scarecrow in his yard, after reassembling it, of course, and by Halloween night- I'm sorry, by HalloweeNight 😆- Mr. Scarecrow is good to go and ready to slice up some, ahem, college students. Things progress accordingly, with Trix, as she's better known- see what they did there? - ultimately the last one standing, in spite of Harold's warnings for her to get the F out of Dodge before it's too late. She does not, and pays the price, via an amusing confrontation with a stop-motion-style Pumpkinhead-esque critter (only WAAAAY more low-rent) that emerges just when she thinks she's safe. Will anyone be left standing in the end, including Creepy Harold himself? You'll just have to see for yourself... if you dare! 🎃
So, yeah, HalloweeNight is way too silly to take the least bit seriously, but I had fun with it, and probably would have had that much more fun with it in my pot smoking days. (Really, the only thing standing between my pot smoking days and now is lack of knowledge on where to get it, now that I've moved back home, lol. 😜) As much as I thought DTV movies were terrible back in the day, I must admit, seeing one now brought back some warm and fuzzy memories that made this one go down a lot easier.
Also, speaking of going down easier, resident bad girl type Danielle Donahue is a cutie. She's mostly just done movies like this- including the aforementioned Amityville Death House, Jurassic Prey, the Empire of the Apes movies and Amityville Island, but I was pleased to see that she was about to make her directorial debut with Snowfall, a film she also is producing and doing the cinematography on herself, in addition to starring in. Aside from the bad timing of the pandemic, I wish her well, and I look forward to seeing how she fares on the other side of the camera.
Yes, most of the acting in HalloweeNight is terrible, with Carpenter particularly wooden and laughable, but really, that just adds to the fun. I mean, someone basically dies on the toilet at one point, so yeah, this movie is absolutely self-aware about how silly it is. But that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it for what it was. It's worth mentioning that the practical effects aren't bad, which is more than I can say for the CGI nonsense in the Halloween Jack movies, so there's that.
Your own mileage may vary, according to how much tolerance you have for Direct-to-Video style movies. For what it's worth, I hated them myself, back in the day, but apparently, I had a softer spot for them than I remembered. Go figure. It's probably nostalgia, but whatever. Check it out, and pour one out for the late John Polonia. 😔
Next up, is another straight-to-home video/streaming effort, this one much more recent, 2017's Return of the Scarecrow. Honestly, this was about this point where I started to reach my killer scarecrow movie quota, and I very nearly abandoned ship after about the first 10-15 minutes of this one. As I knew I was likely to only be able to do this one review this week- it was a busier week than I expected- I decided to give it another 10 minutes of so, if only for the thematically-relatedness of it all and the fact that I could review both movies in one fell swoop. I'm actually glad I did, because it got significantly better as it went along.
Basically, it starts out in a similar way to a lot of these movies- people messing around where they shouldn't be, resulting in the evil scarecrow being resurrected to wreak havoc. But then things take an unexpected turn. We begin with some grave robbers trying to dig up what is alleged to be the location of some buried treasure, only to find that the land really is cursed, which, in turn brings back said scarecrow, who kills them both. Then, sometime in the past, a group of campers, against the warnings of a local bartender, spend the night in the same location, only to be picked off one by one by- you guessed it- the scarecrow.
However, this time around, there is one survivor who lives to tell the tale, with rumors being that she is a witch and that's why she survived. Whether or not that is true, she ends up working at the very same bar alongside the local legend teller, who, years later, is still telling the same old story to tourists, albeit with added deaths, thanks to the aforementioned campers.
This is where things take a welcome turn, as, when he tells the tale, we get a sort of shadow puppet show which is admittedly low-rent, but pretty nifty. We get the full story of the township, which involves, yes, witches and child sacrifices and escaped mental patients and angry mobs and so forth. It's way more back-story than we really need, but I really appreciate the effort, and I dug the sort of pseudo stop-motion animation attempt, which at least shows that the filmmakers have ingenuity and weren't about to let budget trump ambition, which is a good quality for an aspiring filmmakers to have.
Even better, shortly thereafter, we meet the real stars of the movie, Virgil (Jay J. Bidwell, Moving Parts) and Wyatt (Pete Houlihan). These two seem at first blush to be typical redneck types, but writer/director Walter Lodes III (the cleverly-titled Too Dead To Die and the forthcoming Sticky Fingers - The Movie!) amusingly makes them unusually verbose and given to waxing philosophical, while keeping them firmly in the tradition of, say, a Laurel & Hardy type, with one, Wyatt, the clear brains of the group- sort of- and the other a sort of left-of-center doofus.
After overhearing the bartender tell his tale yet again and seeing the effect it has on the latest group of tourists, the two decide to head out to the woods and scare the bejesus out of the bunch. Only they end up getting more than they bargained for- and not just from the scarecrow, mind you. Basically, one of them, Wyatt, ends up repeatedly getting the crap kicked out of him by the tougher half of the camping contingent- which, this being the modern age, are, in fact, two of the women of the group- along with some disgruntled townies, who get wind of a wise-ass dressed as a scarecrow terrorizing everyone and eventually form the aforementioned angry mob to track him down.
Meanwhile, the other, stupider one, Virgil, who gets separated from Wyatt in the initial attack by the women on Wyatt, accidentally ends up with the actual evil scarecrow and, unbeknownst to him, the two go about trying to freak out everyone they come across, which they succeed in doing because one of them isn't faking it. All of which ends up getting blamed on Wyatt, of course, who bears the brunt of the retaliation of the townspeople.
Now, of course, you could ask: why doesn't Wyatt simply take off his scarecrow costume when things start to get hinky for him? Or, for that matter, why doesn't the real evil scarecrow immediately kill Virgil? Well, things do eventually go in that direction, but until then, you just kind of have to go along with it. Which, of course, you can either choose to do or not.
Basically, the whole thing plays like a sort of live action old-school cartoon, down to the whole Scooby Doo-or-Looney Tunes-style gambit of characters who don't know a monster is a monster while we, the audience, do know it- and consequently, know that, eventually, so will said characters - at which point, all hell will break loose. And it does, naturally. I loved that the movie had a sense of humor about itself and that some of the characters were self-aware and the actors playing them were clearly in on the joke.
Oftentimes, when someone is going for camp, it can go disastrously wrong, but, in this case, since the filmmakers are going more for a live-action cartoon, rather than aiming for Ed Wood territory, it actually works more often than not, even if things get off to a rough start. I liked the way Virgil took command when Wyatt was replaced by the evil scarecrow, who only replied by grunts and grrrs and Virgil just took that to be Wyatt "getting into character" like a method actor or what have you. That's pretty clever, even if, IRL, the evil scarecrow would have killed Virgil outright. Of course, IRL, there wouldn't be a killer evil scarecrow in the first place, and the movie gets that, so it has fun with it, accordingly, and treats it like the joke it is.
Granted, we're not talking high end comedy here- this is strictly humor of the low-brow variety. But, for what it is, it works, at least for this viewer. I'd definitely say this one qualifies as the type of movie you watch with a group of drunken friends and make fun of, and I genuinely think it was meant as such. If anything, it seems like the cast and crew themselves were also goofing around and having fun, and you can usually sense that sort of thing while watching. It doesn't always translate to a good movie, and I wouldn't call this good, per se, by any stretch of the imagination, but I enjoyed it for what it was. If you're in the right frame of mind, you probably will, too.
That about does it for now. Join me next week for a look at the Night of the Demon franchise- though, if I can sneak in another Halloween-themed review over the weekend, I will. In the meantime, stay away from those evil scarecrows! 😈
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