Main cast: Amy Groening (Grace), T Thomason (Spencer), Zach Faye (Darren), Taylor Olson (Mike), Marietta Laan (Zoe), Shelley Thompson (Dr Barbara Macail), and Jeremy Akerman (Dr Arthur Macail)
Director: Jay Dahl
Is the whole “obvious-looking adults playing college kids” thing in horror still going strong? I’ve seen more “mom trapped in a haunted house, desperate to save her kids, the daughter being able to talk to ghosts” films these days. Perhaps Halloween Party was kept in someone’s attic in the last five years, only seeing the light of day recently, because boy, it is such a by the numbers formulaic high school teen horror flick that I can easily see director-cum-screenwriter Jay Dahl hastily ticking off all the items on the list.
So, we have the lead lady, Grace. She is, of course, assisted by the nerd, Spencer, and they will find very important and pertinent information is the library. After all, no more how obscure a topic may be, there will always be that one book in a library, as well as that one librarian that can provide exposition, to let the main characters catch up on what is going on. There will be a bunch of assholes that will get their just desserts for being dumb dumb, of course—we can’t forget that one. Also, jump scares galore.
If the whole thing sounded like any generic Blumhouse or Blumhouse-wannabe flicks that flooded the market a few years ago, well, that’s exactly what it is. The only thing different here is the plot, and even then, the plot sounds like a mashed potato of sorts, with all kinds of tropes pulverized and smashed into a gooey mess to get that dish.
So, there is a “meme”, as this movie calls it, going around, that asks Grace’s roommate Zoe to fill in her greatest fear within 40 seconds or… you know, I’m not sure what will happen, as the rules seem to change as the movie progresses. Zoe types in “pigs” so she gets killed by someone wearing a pig mask while she is doing her night shift at the mall.
Grace and Zoe had a conversation about the meme and their fears before the latter was killed, so Grace now has her suspicions about the meme. She gets help from the computer nerd Spencer, the kind that can always come up with convenient gobbledygook to explain anything and everything about the magic of haunted computers, and together they start to pry into the origins of the meme.
Their investigations lead to an eye-rolling possibility that the room Zoe and Grace are staying in, or “were” in Zoe’s case as she’s moved to a much smaller room since, is built upon the bricked-in tomb of some children that were born mutated due to chemicals in their environment. Ah yes, the real enemies in modern genre stuff: humans and climate change. At any rate, the spirits of these children have somehow mastered the art of using a computer as well as image design, because they apparently are the ones that sent the “meme” through the laptop used by Zoe, and now the meme has gone viral from that laptop. What, these ghostly kids can’t just get a Twitter account? That would be so much easier and faster to spread the love, I’d imagine.
This movie has all the ingredients of a campy guilty pleasure. The acting is pretty horrid on the most part, as it ranges from stilted to wooden. Amy Groening—who is not related to the guy behind The Simpsons, apparently—is the only one that does a halfway decent job here. T Thomason fails to show proper emotion or even vocal inflection required of all his scenes, and he comes off like some lost and confused bloke that somehow ended up here when he should have been at Burger King or something five hours ago. The rest of the cast is pretty dire as well, as their performance reeks of “This is why you should never be ashamed of just flipping burgers; can’t be worse than what you are doing now on screen!” realness.
The special effects are… oh my god. They are some of the most fake CGIs I’ve seen, and I lose it and start cackling when they have a bear—not a huge, terrifying, menacing one befitting the fears of bear come true, but a rather cute and adorable one instead—saunter onto an airplane.
The entire film could have worked if the people behind this one had gone all balls to the wall and turn it into an over the top comedic parody of, say, Final Destination meets spooky house haunted by kids meets whatever else that this script is a clumsy amalgamation of. Then, the horrible acting could be interpreted as a deliberate attempt at farce, the fake-looking CGI can be considered par for the course, and the dumb “twist ending” can be treated as the final punchline.
No, instead, Halloween Party tries to play everything straight, and the unfortunate ugly baby of a result is more cringe than anything else.
