Review by BigBadWolfBoy
Reportedly made for under ten thousand dollars, Mr. Halloween tells us the story of a small town with a problem. The town is Sauquoit, New York. The problem? As one of the characters so succinctly states about halfway into this nearly two hour marathon, “…our town has more missing kids than any other town in the nation.” Cuz the most Los Angeles can have is what? Twenty or so?
Well, we’ll disregard facts here. This is, after all, a low-budget horror movie. A low-budget horror movie about a creepy man who runs a haunted house in his backyard every year. Okay, not so much a haunted house as a haunted garage. It’s not so big, you see. But the characters in the movie comment on that, at least, and explain to each other in an expository way that the draw isn’t the size but the alleged fact that the creepy guy (Bill Loomis playing a guy called…uh…Bill Loomis) uses actual body parts to gussie up his haunted garage-house!
Kids go to investigate. Bad things happen to them. Other kids look at Bill Loomis as they walk past his house. Bill Loomis follows them home…and bad things happen to them. A man decides to phone his congressman and complain about his missing child…and bad things happen to him.
Mr. Halloween is a sleek, eighty minute slasher movie inflated into a drab, bloated two hours of frustration. As a director, Andrew Wolf knows how to stage a scare. He is clearly in love with John Carpenter’s Halloween, and when he shows that love Mr. Halloween is surprisingly effective. The killer is vicious, and I didn’t even mind that sometimes he’s quiet and shadowy like Mikey Myers, while other times he’s all screams and fury- his kill scenes work. The music is sparse and ominous. The stings sting well. The grittiness of the low budget video stock even gave me a bit of that old school grungy feeling I haven’t felt since watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time on grainy VHS way back when I was a pup.
I’m serious. With a decent pair of scissors and an ability to reign himself in, Wolf might have had himself a decent chiller here. As it is, however, Mr. Halloween has far too many poorly edited scenes that just go on and on for no reason. And while ultimately I did dig the killer, I still have a few reservations about him that I can’t shake. First off, don’t look at the cover art on the DVD box. If you do you’ll be expecting to see that scary clown dude pop up at some point and you will be as disappointed as I was, cuz he never shows up. Bill Loomis is Mr. Halloween, and Bill Loomis playing Bill Loomis, aka Mr. Halloween, resembles one of the Mario Brothers. Everytime he would burst into a room I had to stop myself from shouting, “Itsa Me! Maaaario!”
Plus, there’s some sort of murky malarky about him hooking himself up to a machine to what? Live forever? Learn kung-fu? I don’t know.
But I give the guy credit. By the end of the movie I was sold. Bill Loomis does a great job playing Bill Loomis. Unfortunately, his is the only performance in the entire movie that isn’t atrociously laughable. With that one exception, this film has by far the worst acting of any film I’ve reviewed yet. The combo of z-grade acting, an unforgivably unwarranted triathalon of a running time (yes I just upped it to a triathalon. Two hours? Really?), and the inclusion of quite possibly the single most annoying character I’ve seen in a movie EVER (it’s the guy who quips that gem I mentioned at the beginning of the review), are what ultimately sink this sackful of screeching kittens.
I think Andrew Wolf has talent as a director. Give the guy a budget, an editor, and bar him from casting any more family members in his movies, and he might yet crank out the sleek, scary slasher that I think he has in him. Despite some effective sequences, Mr. Halloween sure isn’t it.
Yes. Best reviews ever.