Happy Hell Night

There were some good qualities here. The look of the villain is creepy as hell. Some of the special effects were quite good. The images are memorable and stay with you in a good way!

That said, this film has a lot of problems. The flashbacks should not be scarier and more interesting than the main story. There are no clear rules about what the villain can and cannot do which leads to confusion and silliness. But the most egregious problem is the villain's constant one-liners. Honestly, if they cut all the one-liners out of this film, it would probably gain 2 or 3 stars from me. As is, I can't recommend this.

This one had a decent premise going for it but it's plagued with a marginal directorial effort, stale performances, and no suspense whatsoever. The characters are uninspiring and when the movie is over, your eyes will hurt after rolling them for an hour and a half. It's one of those slashers that I could've shut off and not cared how it ended. Poor Darin McGavin, Kolchack hit a low with this one. It's fun seeing Sam Rockwell and Jorja Fox in their 5 minute roles but this one is about as fun as a bad case of hemorrhoids on the Tour de France. Happy Hell Night isn't even worth the effort for die hard slasher aficionados. Maybe Anchor Bay will do something better with their money by obtaining the rights to titles such as Just Before Dawn, The Burning, or Popcorn for their next horror outing.

1991/R-18/84m Darren McGavin, Nick Gregory, Franke Hughes, Laura Carney, Charles Cragin.

Another frat-house slasher film with more willing pledges accidentally releasing a maniac from his asylum habitat some 25 years after he butchered seven people at the local Church in a pact with the devil or something like that...

Ergo, he returns to the frat house and hacks and slashes his way through airhead co-eds and dumb jocks until two brothers (actual brothers, not just frat brothers) and the girl they're both screwing do their best to stop him.

Not as bad as it could be considering how little known it is; Darren McGavin is hardly in it and most of the murder victims are without any indentity - just kids having sex and dying. The killer offers the best distraction, delivering kitsch one-liners with every murder and talking like E.T.! Switch your mind off, sit back and enjoy - if you can...

Happy Hell Night missed their decade by a few years. I believe that's why the movie is so obscure and not very well received. It had a lot of bad characters, choppy editing, and a wasted Darrin McGavin. There also seemed to be some missing ingredients. We would see a character sitting in a chair and the next time we saw that character he would be dead on the floor with no explanation. It does have the creepiest killer since Barlow from Salem's Lot though. There were also some very creepy moments in the film, just too few of them. If the whole film would have taken on the tone of "Scary Jesus" scene, the film would have been great. Other than that, this is not the best fraternity prank/slasher film. How to do it right: Hell Night. How to do is so terrible wrong that it becomes right: Pledge Night. This film is somewhere in between those two and, thus, not as enjoyable. Keep an eye out for a pre-fame Sam Rockwell and Jorja Fox.

When a couple of frat boys break into an insane asylum as part of a Hell Night prank, they release an evil being who has been trapped there for the past 25 years. The demon then proceeds to kill everyone who crosses his path, using a wickedly pointed mountaineering pick as his weapon of choice.

Happy Hell Night is a low budget piece of trash that is, for the most part, pretty awful; the acting is uniformly lousy and the direction uninspired, but, fortunately, the film does deliver a fair amount of (mostly unconvincing) gore and a touch of nudity from a couple of babes, making it just about bearable.

Charles Cragin, as the killer, is fairly creepy to look at—pale and bald with completely black eyes—but his aura of menace is diluted whenever he is given lines to speak. After each kill, the character makes a lame quip with a voice which sounds like he's been gulping back helium—Freddy Krueger he ain't!

Finally, after almost everyone at a frat house party are slaughtered, two brothers (and the slapper they have both been humping) attempt to send the demon back to hell.

Happy Hell Night is silly, instantly forgettable, and only really worth a watch if bad horror movies are your passion.