Halloween Party review: Beware the vagina spiders and pig people in this quirky nostalgic piece of genre cinema.
Image Courtesy of Clout Communications
If you’re scared of pig people, tall men, or vagina spiders, then you might want to give Halloween Party a miss. The film tells the story of a chain-letter-style meme virus that kills you unless you share it along with your deepest darkest fears. Should you fail to enter the correct fear, the thing you are actually most afraid of will hunt you down and murder you; hence the appearance of pig people, a tall man, and vagina spiders in the film.
Despite the rather far-fetched premise of a killer meme, Halloween Party starts strong. The initial attack has a nice air of suspense to it, and it has a compelling couple of leads in Amy Groening and T. Thomason. There’s something of an Alicia Witt / Jared Leto circa Urban Legend feel to their characters Grace and Special, which taps into the nineties nostalgia that the film seems to revel in. Halloween Party could have easily been released in that decade, were it not about a killer meme.
Our cast of characters relies on the stock geeks and jocks. Special and his friends are the epitome of computer nerds, though they do not play up to the tropes of their characters in a nice scene during which Grace first meets them. There isn’t quite the same progression given to the fraternity jocks that also heavily feature in the film. All they care about it booze, babes, and belittling Special. It is when the film shifts its focus to the frat boys that Halloween Party begins to unravel.
Up until here the film has been moving at a nice pace and has heavily focused on Grace and Special. The sudden shift to the second set of characters, who have mainly been in the background, almost stops the film in its tracks. The audience almost has to start again as they get to know these new characters. There isn’t much time for that though as they are all quickly dispatched. The sudden heavy focus on the jocks takes us away from the characters we’ve become invested in for too long and it’s hard to reconnect with the original group when we have reunited with them.
As the film progresses, the rules of the big bad seem to change around a lot, which gets rather confusing, and the film descends into some generic silliness. It’s a shame, as up until this moment, Halloween Party had a lot going for it: some great dialogue, insane ideas (vagina spiders folks), and some genuinely likeable lead characters. A great zany premise is let down by some overly familiar choices towards the end; Halloween Party is a decent, but slightly flawed film.
Halloween Party was reviewed at Arrow Video Frightfest 2019.
