HELL NIGHT – There haven’t been that many slashers in my Halloween run down so far, so here is one. It’s ‘Hell Night’, a bona fide entry in the first wave of the slasher cycle, though not exactly top tier. Despite its shortcomings, it’s grown on me over the years. The set-up is as generic as they come – a fraternity / sorority hazing takes place overnight in an abandoned mansion with a backstory – textbook stuff. What sets ‘Hell Night’ apart is that it merges slasher tropes with the Hammer look. The pretext of the college kids’ fancy-dress night is an excuse for the filmmakers to doll everyone up in gothic garb in a set flickering with candleflame, and it’s a lovely incongruity that gives ‘Hell Night’ a leg up when all the usual shenanigans start to unfold. It’s also a good decision on the part of the makers, because ‘Hell Night’ doesn’t deliver all that much slasher action at all, really – there are four main protagonists plus a couple of sub-plot facilitating pranksters in the background, making for a fairly meagre body count that isn’t dispatched with much graphic chutzpah. If that leaves ‘Hell Night’ with only the ‘goth atmosphere’ card to fall back on, it’s a card well played. The feel is strongly Autumnal, and even though the season isn’t referenced specifically you get all these evocative images of fallen leaves and windswept avenues. Then of course there’s the house itself, a maze of tunnels and dim corridors festooned with cobwebs, where Linda Blair wanders like a forlorn countess with a candelabra. Admittedly, a problem connected with the lack of emphasis on kills is the unwieldy runtime; you can only stare at nice looking shadows and sinister staircases so long before you start to twitch. But as much as you could make a case for ‘Hell Night’ being a bit of a yawn, there’s too much I like about it for me to feel that way. Even when it hits slight doldrums there are quirks that come to the rescue, such as the cops who don’t give a shit that a desperate guy’s just reported a murder, and little bits where we’re left wondering whether we’ve seen a ghost or another one of those unfunny student pranks. There’s also a really weird set-up where it’s hammered home that part of Linda Blair’s backstory is that she used to be a mechanic, just so that near the end she can fix the archetypal ‘car that doesn’t start’ and escape – a clever nod that falls flat because the rest of the movie isn’t particularly meta. In the end though, there’s something heartwarming about ‘Hell Night’s combination of lame slashing, vague Scooby Doo-ism and misty October vibes.
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