Zombos Says: Makes me stay away from creepy-looking haunts on dead roads for sure.
Four girls (Harper, Bailey, Angela, and Mallory) and two guys (Nathan and Evan ) leave the safety of a bar-party on Halloween night looking for a little more fun and excitement. That was the goal anyway. Instead, they find an extreme haunt attraction that has maybe three cars in the lot, down a lonely road that sees more activity with roadkill than cars, with a really creepy clown (okay, yeah, when aren’t they creepy?) silently ushering them into the warehouse (though the set was filmed in the closed A.J. Jolly Memorial School in California, Kentucky). The fact he takes their cell phones doesn’t phase them. Top this off with an opening credits during which ominous scenes of the haunt setup sell the terror to come and you have a tidy Halloween horror just begging for victims and you to watch.
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods build the eerie vibe and suspense until the group realizes it’s all real and then the movie switches everyone into survival and escape mode. Good luck with that. Soon the group does the de rigueur divide and conquer when they come to a fork in the maze. Before this, they witness a tableau vivant where a person in a witch mask does something nasty to an earlier guest — who definitely got her money’s worth of terror for the evening. They shrug it off. We, of course, know what’s coming. We also soon realize, as they do, the haunt is run by a band of psychos who have a mask fixation.
Bailey (Lauryn McClain), Nathan (Will Brittain), and Angela (Shazi Raja) go one way, and Mallory (Schuyler Helford), Harper (Katie Stevens), and Evan (Andrew Lewis Caldwell) go the other way. Evan, the Uber guy, you just know he’s heading for a nasty fall. Pretty early on you know who the final girl will be too because she gets the backstory. For the rest, well, let the haunt — I mean hunt — begin. I admit I’m not a serious haunt kind of guy; crawl spaces, dark spaces, foreboding orifices, and silent scare actors make my skin shrink and my mouth dry and they are par for this movie. Unfortunately, for this group, the scare actors, better called death actors here, play their part very well. The kills are gruesome but quick and the pacing and tension, with perfectly timed silences and music, make the view to a kill a treat for us, a desperate struggle for them.
Sam (Samuel Hunt), Harper’s ex with the hand trouble, tracks them down to the haunt and steps into it too. Short step, though. Bit by bit, the men behind the masks reveal themselves, providing for a cool prequel if that ever happens. As for Harper, she needs to overcome a troubled childhood while avoiding pitchforks, shotguns, and other sharp and blunt objects, while the camera goes wide than close, stays still, and then moves around. The makeup and practical effects really set a gritty mood and the tone is sans humor. The movie comes close to generating a video nasties coating but, dare I say it, with more of a modern indie horror movie’s mechanics. It received limited release when it first hit theaters, but you can catch it on Shudder.
Once more, the League of Reluctant Reviewers brings you the unfathomable, the unbelievable, and the never to be forgotten oddities all around us to be found in movies.
