There’s something very admirable about the making of HauntedWeen. Director Doug Robertson, a Kentucky native, was determined to do something in his own backyard. He filmed it on the grounds of the same college he once attended, had an entire local community help out with the movie, and independently distributed VHS copies of the film himself. Shot on a rather low budget using 16mm film, it turned into a somewhat fun, campy early-’90s horror. Full-on DIY.
Certainly, it’s not without its faults. This movie has some truly spacious downtime going for it. But we’ll get into that.
Looking to make a little extra money, a college fraternity decides to reopen a haunted house that’s been abandoned for years. Considering it holds a dark history, you can probably guess where this is headed.
It starts out 20 years in the past as we see our antagonist, Eddie Burber, taking money for admission into The Burber House of Horrors. Eddie Burber doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like Freddy Krueger, but okay. I didn’t write the thing.
So, he’s a kid who’s into monster magazines and wearing Halloween masks. He wants to work inside the house itself rather than outside, so, as any kid would, he sneaks in via the air ducts. I’ve heard the Die Hard comparison joke before, and yeah, he literally pulls a John McClane to get inside his parents’ haunted house.
He runs around a room, scaring some girl who impales herself on a piece of wood. So, naturally, he pulls a machete out of thin air and slices her off camera. As any kid would. His mom notices what he did, and they move away… somewhere, I guess.
Fast forward to the present. Literally a one-minute scene of Eddie and his mother living together, where she just dies for no reason. He does a great Darth Vader “NOOOOOOO” impression, and he takes his mother’s body back “home.”
That’s a fun 10-minute-or-so opening. Unfortunately, the movie will now spend the next 40-50 minutes with mostly characters you won’t care about, maybe aside from one.
We have now entered the fraternity part of our scheduled program. Drinking, dancing, live music, bad dialogue, hack jokes, and oh so many Kentucky accents. We mostly follow a couple, Kurt and Mel, as they deal with relationship issues and such. This entire part of the movie feels like it’s a different script altogether. I’m sure it’s all for budgetary reasons, but this really is part horror, part boner comedy.
The one character who’s easily the most memorable is Hanks, played by Brad Hanks in his only film credit. Whether it’s an exaggerated accent he’s doing or this is just how people in Kentucky speak, it’s funny. And it’s more convincing than nepo-baby Chet Hanks doing his Jamaican accent. Feel free to Google that one. Or ya know, don’t.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this movie spends most of its runtime with this frat just literally talking. That’s it. You get a musical montage that comes with its own HauntedWeen theme song. And as established earlier, they reopen the Burber Haunted House. It’s not until almost the one-hour mark that they do the Friday the 13th-style campfire exposition dump about the history here. That’s where the first kills since the opening start happening.
We finally get to the third act, and that’s where this kicks back into why you’re here. Unless you really love the frat-hijinks comedy genre. The haunted house becomes a set piece for Eddie to start killing everyone off in creative ways. He uses it as an attraction, so the people walking through think it’s all part of the act.
That’s what makes this watchable. Yes, of course it’s low budget, but to be honest, it looks way better than you’d ever think, considering everything. The effects, the blood, the lighting—I’ve seen way more slasher films with bigger budgets that look nowhere near as good.
It’s a mixed bag, but when it’s entertaining, it delivers. “When” is the key word. If you can overlook its shortcomings, there’s enough Halloween spirit here to make it worth a watch.
Also, this movie proved that if you fire a gun, just once, at a moving van, it will explode into a ball of flames. Beware of that this season.
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