Curse of Halloween (2006)


Directed by Jeremy Isbell (AKA THE GUILTY)

Do you want to know what the real Curse of Halloween is? You order the DVD from Amazon.com before Halloween and it remains on backorder until almost Christmas. Then you finally get the DVD and what you receive is a DVD-R with box art that appears to have been photocopied. The back of that DVD case states that the film is in widescreen, the special features on the disc, and is 90 minutes in length, but then you put the DVD in and discover that there are no extras - probably because it doesn't even have a menu - and that the film is most definitely not in widescreen and ultimately turns out to be only around an hour long.

Back around the beginning of October I reported on the then impending DVD release of this mystery movie called Curse of Halloween, a film I could find nary any information about on the web other than a miniscule plot synopsis, DVD art, and a proposed October 24th release date. Let me just quote you that brief description here:

"Several people are cursed to die on Halloween Night when they wake the Great Queen Pumpkin during a sacrifice. Now they must fight to survive when the Queen Pumpkin goes out Halloween Night on a killing spree. How many people must die on Halloween Night before the Pumpkin is stopped."

The only reason I even bothered to plunk my own hard earned cash down to purchase a DVD of the film was because of my own curiosity to see what the heck this Great Queen Pumpkin was; the concept intrigued me considerably. Yeah, I suspected Curse of Halloween would to turn out to be some ultra low budget affair and more than likely crap-on-a-stick in terms of quality, but the prospects of this Great Queen Pumpkin beckoned me still.

Forget the characters of this movies, folks; turns out I'm the real victim of the Great Queen Pumpkin.

Curse of Halloween opens with a guy holding a gun to his head babbling about this fateful Halloween night when he and his friends... Folks, if you put a gun to my head I still wouldn't be able to explain to you much of anything that happens in this film. Some guy hits this girl with his car and takes her indoors, his friends show up, the girl vanishes, and stuff happens that usually ends with someone unconscious or tied up or dead or whatever. I'd reckon a good 90% of that random stuff consists of characters slowly walking around; everything that does happen seems to occur completely at random and anything that does happen happens in a blink of an eye.

So, uh, that girl, I think she was supposed to be the ghostly Great Queen Pumpkin that everyone is supposed to be so scared of. She just looked like your typical young blonde woman in negligee to me. Scary? No. She was actually kinda cute. She's also barely in the movie. Most of the horror deals with this pale-faced, husky guy in an Emperor Palpatine cloak that sneaks up behind people and tasers them with a flash from his hand. He also issues shortly worded warnings and abducts the women, sometimes tying them to trees or choking them or whatever.

After the first half hour of randomness, it turns into the next day with everyone waking up disoriented, not entirely sure what happened - sorta like me watching this film. I believe it was about 40 minutes in when a completely random sex scene broke out that finally moved me to openly exclaim aloud alone in my living room, "What the hell is this crap, who the hell made this crap, why the hell am I watching this crap, and why the hell did I buy this crap?"

Curse of Halloween is an amateur film - a total backyard production - made by people that decided to make a movie without much of any resources or the understanding that movies are meant to be watched by people other than just the people that made it and their friends and relatives. The only thing in the entire film that entertained me in the slightest was hearing the punching sound effects during a fist fight that sounded as if they were taken straight from the original Street Fighter video game.

Oh, and the film boasts possibly the most obvious body double scene in movie history. One moment a girl takes her top off and turns around and then we suddenly cut to a close-up shot of a pair of breasts only obviously not belonging to this young woman we saw a moment earlier, plus the lighting, film stock, and background are all completely different.

Now up until this point, even though Curse of Halloween was borderline unwatchable, I still couldn't bring myself to hate on it too much because the reality that what I was watching was amateur movie that should never ever ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have seen the light of day outside of the filmmaker's living room. I wonder if the distributors, Central Film Company, came to this realization and decided to cancel the print run of the film only to have the folks at Amazon put a gun to their heads to produce a lone DVD because one unfortunate bastard (ME!) made the grave mistake of ordering a copy.

But after this point, what happened next - unforgivable. I don't care if you're a novice filmmaker or not, what the people responsible for this thing did next was beyond the realm of justification.

About 44 minutes in we go back to the guy with the gun to his head so that he can start babbling about a boat trip a year later (I think), leading to footage of people heading out on a boat on a lake. I think the filmmakers actually found a way to work their vacation footage into their movie in order to help stretch the running time out to an hour. That's the only thing I can figure because this montage goes on for over ten minutes. Ten minutes!



A dialogue-free musical montage of people sitting around on a boat, swimming, watching other boats and jet skis go by, talking to one another (but we can't make out what they're saying), drinking beer, etc.


Then they finally get to wherever the hell they were going so that they can walk around some woods and a beach for roughly another three-to-five minutes until someone kills them all off in like a span of 30 seconds. Who killed them? Could have been the cameraman for all I knew or cared at this point.

The movie then cuts back to suicidal what's-his-face with the gun to his temple. This time he prattles on despondently about not having any idea what happened that Halloween night or who killed his friends or how he can't take it anymore. He pulls the trigger and the DVD ends. Yep, just ends. No closing credits - nothing! It just stops. That was the end of the movie and the end of the DVD. I found myself wondering if the guy driven to blow his brains out due to the events of Curse of Halloween was actually a character in the film or the last person that watched this abysmal attempt at filmmaking.

My God!

Curse of Halloween was such an abomination that I'm now legitimately concerned that this wasn't a real movie after all but some sort of Ring-like scenario that'll lead to my untimely death in a week or was a Videodrome-esque experiment that'll cause me to start having hallucinations and begin pulling videocassettes out of my abdomen. Maybe that's the real Curse of Halloween?

0 out of 5

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