The Halfway House

totally wrong on every level but captivating all the same. so inexcusably pathetic but also so addictive to watch just to see if the acting picked up further into it. a good Sunday movie if you are hungover from the night before, great for zombie-ing out to on an overcast afternoon.

i found myself wondering if these actors have made it in Hollywood, or whether they still are waitressing. not quite even a soft porn movie even if there are plenty of breasts on show.

please ensure you have downed a bottle of vodka or two in the hour before commencing.

OH LORD this one sucks. Pseudo-Lovecraftian garbage with very little gore, a few tits (but NO full-frontal), horrible acting - oh Christ, I give up - the list of negatives about this film is just way too long and encompasses just about every aspect of this piece of trash.

The super-condensed version (because that's all this crap deserves): Girls are disappearing around an all-girl halfway house and being fed to a monster that lives in the basement by the head nun. The police and one of the missing girls' sisters gets involved in the "investigation"...

In case you haven't already gathered- I pretty much hated this "film". Posing as a modern exploit film but not having the balls to take the concept all the way - THE HALFWAY HOUSE is a let-down all the way through. I don't know if this film was supposed to be loosely based on one of H.P. Lovecraft's works - but there are references to the Necronomicon, Miskatonic University, the town of Arkham, etc...that would probably cause ol' H.P. to rise from his grave and slaughter everyone involved in this waste-of-film if he would ever have had the misfortune to witness it. Anyway...unless you REALLY dig schlocky, no-budget, SOV/STV, camp-horror with virtually no gore and not nearly enough nudity - leave this one on the shelf...2/10

I have seen some pretty poor movies in my time, but this takes the biscuit, it is truly terrible ... the plot is dreadful, the acting is diabolical, the monster is laughable, everything about The Halfway House is awful !!!

I am not sure, either, exactly what this movie is supposed to be, or what it is trying to be. If it's supposed to be a horror movie it fails spectacularly, I only jumped once in the entire film and that was in a part that I think was supposed to be funny !!!

If it is supposed to be titillating, it also fails spectacularly. I'm not going to complain about seeing numerous half naked women, even if only 2 of them were remotely good looking, but what was the point of most of the nudity if not to titillate and entertain, it certainly did neither !!!

In summary, it was like a cheap porn movie without the porn !!!

**SPOILERS** Ridicules as well as insulting soft-core porno horror movie that has Catholic Nun Sister Cecelia ,Mary Moronov, who became secretly involved in the Black Arts through the Satanic book of the dead Necronomicon. Sister Cecelia ends up conjuring up this creature from another dimension who looks like the rubber octopus in "Bride of the Monster" with a ferocious set of teeth.

Working behind the back of Father Fogerty (Joseph Tatnen), who runs the halfway house for runaway girls where she's assigned to, Sister Cecelia together with the halfway house's creepy handy-man Lutkus, Cleve Hall, secretly have the girls fed to this creature. This is done in order to nourish it and eventually have Sister Cecelia become it's bride! So that the blessed couple would produce a race of half-human half-octopus-like off-springs to take over and rule the world.

Father Fogerty himself is anything but innocent in the movie having a faddish of not only reading and looking at the photos of girly magazines where young, and well endowed, women get spanked. That's were Father Fogerty gets the idea of disciplining the girls at his halfway house by spanking them silly in the privacy of his office for any infraction that they commit.

After jogger Annie Morgan, Ashley Rgea, is reported missing by her older sister Larissa, Janet Tracy Keijser, she with the help of police Sgt. Dick Sheen, Shawn Savage,goes undercover at the halfway house where Annie was last seen jogging. It's also suspected that a number of other girls reported missing over the last few months also disappeared there.

Getting to know what's really happening at the halfway house by getting very friendly with one of the runaway girls Cherry Pie, Stephanie Leighs, Larissa plans to get the goods on both Sister Cecelia and her accomplice in crime Lutku.Larissa ends up getting caught by the Satanic trio when Cherry Pie was too slow to inform her that Sister Cecelia was coming as the two were about to escape from the place.

Sgt. Sheen coming to the rescue is caught by surprise by Latkus who shoves a blade right through him. Down in the basement of the halfway house Sister Cecelia, in a witch-like outfit, is about to bring out of the dungeon the one-eyed octopus-like creature to devour Cherry Pie for lunch only to have Father Fogerty pop up. shocked at what he sees, Sister Cecelia out of uniform, Fogerty tries to get the creature to desist, from eating Cherrie pie. Fogerty does this by reciting passage's from the bible only to have his hand, holding a crucifix, cut off with a pair of shears by Lutkus

Coming back from the dead Sgt. Sheen, with a two foot long knife protruding from his chest, takes out Lutkus where the creature for some strange reason attacks Sister Cecelia now dressed up like some kind of Demonic Wizard. The creature ends up swallowing her down whole like actor Robert Shaw was in the movie "Jaws" with Larissa, also like in the movie "Jaws", throwing a plastic container of gasoline into it's mouth and blowing the creature to kingdom come.

The movie "The Halfway House" is not only dopey with bad acting and a lot of it's story not making any sense at all it's not even intentionally or unintentionally funny. Its just plain bad and insulting to everyone, of any religious or non-religious persuasion, watching it.

So many horror films these days are such a disappointment, but man was I surprised by this little low budget gem! It had me in tears, I was laughing so hard. It had it all... lots of nudity (I do mean lots!), some incredibly funny lines, and some great kills!

It was directed by Kenneth J. Hall, who wrote "Puppet Master", a Full Moon film that was actually quite good. They should have had Hall write more of their films.

Anyway, I managed to catch a screening of "The Halfway House" at the North Hollywood Film Fest. The rest of the audience loved it as much as I did. It seems like a tribute to all the fun exploitation horror movies I loved in my youth, filled with sexy juvenile delinquents (played by much older girls), weird characters, and a Lovecraftian monster. Hall isn't satisfied with spoofing one genre. He takes on a whole bunch of them… and succeeds! The production looks good and the cast, led by veteran actress Mary Woronov, is first-rate. Anyone who is a fan of old-school drive-in horror movies from the 60s and 70s is bound to like this movie. I can't wait to see what this guy does next.