Hack-O-Lantern (1988)

Movie: Hack-O-Lantern (1988), directed by Jag Mundhra

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.01 miles, 9’06”/mile, 01:03:47 (recovery run)

 

Halloween is almost here! And while I’m still honing a strategy for pandemic-safe treat delivery to any trick-or-treaters who might brave the low-40s temperatures and the predicted 1-3 inches of snow that may well still be on the ground from the previous evening (my current plan involves setting up shop at the end of my driveway and using tongs to put goodies on a folding table for collection), that doesn’t mean I don’t have time to watch some more Halloween-specific movies to spruce up the mood. Tonight’s selection is Hack-O-Lantern, a baffling ordeal from 1988 that’s arrived on Shudder just in time to upset and befuddle me.

 

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Hack-O-Lantern is about an incestuous redneck Satanist with an oddly Liberace makeup-and-jewelry aesthetic who has Big Satanic Plans for his little grandson (and possibly biological son, ewwww) Tommy Drindle. His daughter Amanda—Tommy’s mom—is, shall we say, uncomfortable with that, and her husband Bill goes to confront Grandpa about it on Halloween—at which point Grandpa’s coven kills Bill with a hammer and burns him in his car. So far so good.

 

Then we cut to 13 years later, and Tommy is all grown up and super-Satanic under Grandpa’s tutelage. (Clearly the power of Satan is working overtime, as Tommy’s skin and hair color have both changed completely.) Tommy is 100% the bad boy in the family, which we know because he wears black and eschews sleeves in order to show off his Evil Biceps, and also his walls are adorned with posters of Elvira, light beer, and—I SWEAR I am not making this up—Levi’s corduroys. Oh, and also when he listens to terrible hair metal on his Walkman, he has visions of a full-length music video with (for some reason) a dancing Kali shooting green lasers out of her eyes and vaporizing band members before decapitating him with a trident. Just say no, kids.

 

Anyway, it’s Halloween, and there’s going to be a big Satanic ritual to welcome Tommy to the coven, which of course coincides with the town’s Halloween party. Tommy’s sister Vera will be attending the party, along with her friend Beth—who just happens to be hot for Tommy’s other brother Roger. Oh, and Roger’s a cop assigned to keep the peace at the party. With me so far?

 

But oh no! Someone in a devil mask is running around killing off the Drindle kids’ love interests with gardening tools! The first victim is Tommy’s girlfriend Nora, she of the inverted pentagram Sharpied onto her butt (seriously, you can see it mostly rubbed off in the pool scene). Next up is Brian, Vera’s boyfriend; he winds up with a shovel to the head and buried in a shallow grave—a grave that Roger and Beth wind up boinking on top of, incidentally. Naturally, Beth takes Vera to see the spot in the graveyard where she screwed her brother (like ya do), which is when Vera finds Brian’s body and gets distraught. She immediately rushes off to the local Satan Barn to confront Tommy, whom she suspects of the murder, which is understandable, since Tommy had just beat up Brian earlier that day and threatened to kill him.

 

Of course, Vera interrupts Tommy’s induction into the local Satanic 4H chapter, and winds up slated as the human sacrifice. Will Tommy be able to go through with it? If not, will Vera escape to the Halloween bash with Beth so they can tell RogerCop about the murders and all the satan stuff? If so, will Devil-Mask kill a random woman who was hitting on Roger, as well as his graveyard sex partner Beth, before getting into a frickin’ swordfight at the party? Will Devil-Mask’s identity be unveiled in the least surprising twist in cinematic (well, cinematic-adjacent) history? And most important of all: will we, the feckless viewers, be randomly subjected to the worst 90 seconds of standup comedy ever to blight human comprehension in the middle of an alleged horror movie?

 

That’s right, folks, everything about Hack-O-Lantern is two parts incompetent, two parts incomprehensible, and three parts completely bananas. It’s almost like the experience was finely crafted to break your soul, possibly in hopes of rendering you incapable of noticing just how bad this movie is. Case in point: by the time you’re just starting to recover from seeing a dude feel up his own daughter on her wedding day, you’re probably too off-balance to notice that Nora pays for $40 of booze with a single bill and is given $15 in change.

 

The script is appalling, with dialogue seemingly written by a third-grader with a book of puns in collaboration with a fifth-grader who’s just starting to figure out what a sexual innuendo is and is therefore practicing them a lot but not doing so hot. The acting is, unthinkably, worse—though I suspect that was largely due to the inept direction; I’m pretty sure every take ended with the director saying “I need it a LOT BIGGER.” To his credit, Hy Pyke (the guy in Blade Runner who buys snakes from the Egyptian ALL THE TIME, PAL) delivers: he overacts Grandpa so big he’s visible from space.

 

And if all that doesn’t confuse you, there’s an odd Bollywood aesthetic always lurking at or near the surface—Tommy’s wardrobe, the overdone facial expressions, the snake dancer at the party, Kali in the hair metal music video, Satanists that look more like Thuggee cultists from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, etc. But given how bizarre and off-putting everything else in this movie is, honestly, it kind of feels right.

 

That’s not to say there’s no reason to watch Hack-O-Lantern. One reason might be if you’re in the mood to see a bunch of ’80s nudity, because almost every woman in this thing gets at least a little bit naked. Another could be if you’re in the mood to watch something so bad it’s good, because this could qualify; it’s definitely bad, but a fun kind of bad. And still another reason might be if you want to lobotomize yourself but are a tad squeamish about the whole icepick-in-the-eye-socket thing. Trust me, watching Hack-O-Lantern is (arguably) easier on the eyes, and equally effective. Go for it!