Movie Details
| Title: | Hell Night | |
| Director: | Tom DeSimone | |
| Year: | 1981 | |
| Genre: | Slasher | |
| Times Seen: | 2 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.05.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.05.07 | Terror Thursday | Revisiting this slasher flick because I never quite trust my judgement when I see anything in the midst of an all-night marathon. The highs seem higher and the lows seem lower after 6 or 8 hours in a theater. However, I still think this is a solid middle of the road slasher. I certainly don't think it's bad, but it gets pretty laggy and doesn't really stand out for me at all. I think Vincent Van Patten is the best part of the movie. He's funny in pretty much every scene, and reminds me of that other actor who was in North Shore and White Water Summer. And the movie slows down right when he leaves. Coincidence? Also, there were some BOO! type scares that caught many in the audience and that always has to be respected, and I think the ending is pretty solid which always helps. That's really it though... the rest of it is pretty mediocre. Oh, I also thought there should've been some nudity, but since there wasn't I liked the PG sex scene... it's like what an 8 year old thinks sex is... he kisses her on the belly and they roll around for a few seconds and it's over. Score one for the good guys. |
| 04.29.06 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: Best of QT Fest So Apparently director Tom DeSimone directed some gay porn. Quentin told us the whole story... it wasn't just a just-breaking-in, stepping-stone type of deal... it was like 10 years, 25 movies, Tom DeSimone: Gay Porn Director. I guess he did them well enough though that somehow he got a chance to make a slasher movie and this is what came about. To tell you the truth, QT's intros are all melding together for me now. As the night went on, I stayed awake less and less out of actual interest in the films and more and more out of sheer caffeination. In fact, I didn't even write the title of this movie down in my notebook... all that's there are two small notes, one of which is "AKA The Movie That Wouldn't Die." First though... Quentin announced that they'd show the first reel of Silent Night, Deadly Night! "If Vanishing Point has one of the best last reels of any movie, Silent Night, Deadly Night has one of the best first reels... and we're showing it to you tonight!" Now, in my humble opinion, I think they should've made Sunday night a triple feature and shown Policewomen to open that night so they could play all of Silent Night, Deadly Night tonight. It would've fit perfectly and for as good as the first reel is, the rest of the movie's pretty damn good as well. Plus it would've represented QT6 which didn't have any other films playing this best-of festival. I'm mostly ok with that because it meant that I got to see more movies I've never seen before, but still.. Silent Night, Deadly Night, Tarzoon, and No Way Out were clear audience faves (although we did get a Tarzoon trailer that drew mega-applause). But oh well, I can live with just the first reel, which ended in a pretty great cut between a nun's concerned face and college girls in beer-drenched t-shirts. Something about that time of night and the rush of redbull going through my system created perfect conditions for the famed Grandpa speech in that first reel though. As soon as grandpa started moving his eyes to look at poor young Billy, I completely cracked up. I tried to keep my laughter silent but i was shaking... SHAKING with laughter through the entire speech. Every little movement and nuance that the grandpa made, the inflection on every word coming out of his mouth, was like the funniest thing in the world to me. It's such a perfect monologue... perfectly written, perfectly executed... at the very end I finally gave in and threw my head back and laughed like a madman so I could release all that energy and get to the job of wiping my eyes dry and catching my breath... but that first reel of Silent Night, Deadly Night would prove to be my favorite movie of the whole marathon. He really should have played the whole thing. Hell Night is about a fraternity initiation ritual where rushes have to spend a night in a supposedly haunted mansion. I guess this film is notable for having Linda Blair in it... I dunno, it seemed like a pretty run-of-the-mill slasher movie to me. I don't understand how they could use this haunted mansion as a house so much that they've rigged it with speakers for playing random screams and rope ladders to the roof so they can rig fake bodies hanging outside the windows and they know all about all the secret passages and NOT seeing the evil deformed mongoloid children of the house's haunted history before this particular night. Were they on vacation or something? Is that why they're killing all the co-eds? "We get back from Boca to find you punk kids squatting in our house, you're gonna pay, mongoloid style!" The majority of the movie is shots of kids walking down hallways or passageways, then finding dead bodies. I mean I guess that could be said about all slasher movies... maybe it was the time of day (or, in this case, morning... already) or whatever but I didn't really get into this movie at all. I think Quentin talked about some guy having a long monologue to do and pulling it off or whatever and nah... don't care. Actually there's only one character in this movie that I did care about, and that's Vincent Van Patten's part. Apparently, when it was first showed at QT3, he was voted by Rick Linklater (who showed up earlier, stopping by on his way to Cannes) as the festival's biggest Weenie. I can believe that... he's a pretty massive weenie in this... but hey, he can't help it. He's young, he's in college, and he's out to get his love on. After he finally nails the clearly-a-slut girl he's been chasing since the beginning of the movie, he says to himself "Score another one for the good guys." So him, along with a halfway decent end to the mongoloid killer (spoiler: he hotcurls her to death... actually i'm kidding. he's actually impaled on a knocked-over gate), are really the only things I got out of this movie. Mostly, it was people slowly walking down hallways and passageways and running into dead bodies. |
