Hell Night opens with a bloodcurdling scream. The next shot reveals the cause of distress: a bevy of young women have just been soaked in a wet T-shirt contest. This is but one facet of the impressive party scene. The camera tracks along the street in a surprisingly technical one-shot, which ultimately settles on Alpha Sigma Rho, where coeds are hanging out of the windows and off the roof like drunken Muppets. It’s immediately clear this isn’t your run-of-the-mill slasher flick, shot in the woods for a scant hundred-thousand dollars. The film’s budget, north of a million bucks, puts it in the esteemed company of Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Hellraiser.
The cause for celebration is the fraternity’s initiation ritual, in which pledges will be forced to spend the night locked in Garth Manor, a palatial estate whose gates, as one character puts it, “are nearly impossible to climb!” The pledges are a rich boy, a surfer dude, a party chick, and Linda Blair. I’ve long been fascinated with Blair’s post-Exorcist career, in which exploitation filmmakers desperately tried to pivot her into a wide range of roles before her stardom cooled. The filmmakers beg us to believe this cherubic young woman would turn more heads than the abundance of conventionally attractive babes at the party. You certainly couldn’t accuse Blair of ever being typecast, though, if only because she immediately aged out of the type that made her famous.
Just so we’re clear on what kind of movie Hell Night is, Garth Manor has been shuttered for decades, yet none of the college kids wonders why there are a hundred candles already burning when they arrive. After such a wonderful party scene, it’s disappointing that the film will focus on the four pledges, which greatly reduces the victim pool. Thankfully, three more characters will sneak back in to play pranks on the main characters. These pranks involve speakers, wired doors, and projection technology that’s clearly superior to the hologram that brought Tupac back to life more than thirty years later.
Someone begins picking off the dimwits as they inevitably find ways to split off from the group. Yes, it becomes a lot more routine at that point, but it’s worth noting that these tropes had yet to become old hat by the film’s release in 1981. Even if you won’t give it leeway for that, give it leeway for being better acted and better filmed than ninety-percent of these things. Hell Night is no classic, but I wouldn’t look at you sideways if you owned it on physical media. There are actually a couple of scenes that are surprisingly tense, one involving a character discovering that the aforementioned gate is topped with razor-sharp spires.
If you’re wondering why the horrors of Garth Manor have long remained dormant, only to reawaken on this particular night, who cares? A film like Hell Night doesn’t owe us logic, only thrills, and it pretty much delivers the goods even though it’s a little light on the gore.
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