Hell Night: Pray For More Movie Like This

“Pray for Day.” This is the tag-line for the ultimately-forgettable-but-loved-by-me 1981 slasher film Hell Night. As a demented young lad, my love of shock and trash cinema started with a little mom-and-pop video store called Magic Video. Remember those? Video stores pre-Blockbuster that had both “legit” cinema and porn? Coming of age, man. Also, on a semi-related tangent: fuck DVD and fuck Netflix; I long to a return to the halcyon days of 80-cents-a-night video rentals. VHS will live again, much like many of the antagonists in the movies featured on this blog.

Alright, no more tangents, time to get back on point. I first encountered this movie when I was 9 or 10 and perusing Magic Video for my weekend watches (Fridays me and my brothers was granted two rentals by my parental units; at a buck-sixty who could resist?), the cover art and tag-line for Hell Night grabbed me hard and refused to let go. Linda Blair, scared out of her wits, framed behind an imposing wrought iron fence and in front of a traditional horror-movie mansion all while fighting off an undead rapist. “Pray for Day” my ass, I'd be praying to get out of the situation a little earlier than that. Many a Friday night did I watch this movie with the remorseless glee that would come to define my adult life.

Time for a little synopsis. Hell Night is a complete rip-off of an H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Lurking Fear.” What, that doesn't tell you all you need to know? Alright, the similarities of the two works are such: There's an old-money rich family that more than anything else wanted some heirs to carry on the tradition of being rich; There's a problem with the heirs, namely they're all mongoloids; an insane father kills the entire family; one (or two) mongoloid sons survives through other reasons; one (or two) mongoloids sons haunts the local countryside or now-abandoned mansion kill any motherfucker prettier than them (everyone). The difference is that Hell Night strips all of Lovecraft's queasy racism from the story and includes drunken college cavorting. It's an improvement.

Hell Night was written by some people who never went to college, as none of these characters act like any college students I've ever known, but was written with a love for old urban legends. That's an improvement so I'm OK with it. The central selling point of Hell Night is to remove Lovecraft's story from it's rural setting and place it in the context of a college frat's tradition of “hell night” where pledges have to stay the night in the mansion where one (or two) mongoloid sons were spared a disappointed father's undying rage. Never in the story is it explained why, even though it's a tradition for pledges to spent the night in the mansion, the one (or two) mongoloid sons chose this moment to finally lose their shit and murder everyone in said mansion.

Not that it really matters, but I was curious while watching the movie.

So the review has been marginally rambling and even though I've been trash-talking Hell Night, it seems that I do enjoy the movie. So what's good about it? Aside from being released in the slasher mecca (1980-1982) with peers like Terror Train, Prom Night, Friday the 13^th, and My Bloody Valentine. Bonus question: how many of those flicks star Jaime Lee Curtis? While Hell Night does not star Jaime Lee Curtis, it does have another early-80s scream queen in Linda Blair. And I don't know, maybe it's me, but aside from giving a tough, confident, charming performance, she's also cute as a button. I dig Linda Blair. The other actors are fine: The douches are douches and the non-douches aren't douches and are reasonably sensible, which is fine for these movies. Horror movies are much harder to watch when the characters are bone-stupid. Great monster designs, fun effects, and a director that really understands the party/gothic/urban legend aspect of the story and Hell Night is a great, classic slasher movie mold. It does nothing new, but it delivers a solid 80 minutes of horror goodness.

***/****