Hack-O-Lantern (1988)

 

Director: Jag Mundhra

Screenplay: Dave Eisenstark and Carla Robinson

Cast: Hy Pyke as Grandpa; Gregory Scott Cummins as Tommy; Katina Garner as Amanda; Carla B. As Vera; Jeff Brown as Roger; Michael Potts as Bill; Patricia Christie as Beth; Larry Coven as Brian

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #202

 

But Mom, I like the taste of blood.

Sunny and idyllic Americana introduces Hack-O-Lantern; the film, restored, does look good. Of note is that the director, Jag Mundhra, was born in India, making a career in American genre films in the late eighties and nineties before returning made to his homeland to make films there before his passing in 2011, which makes him inherently fascinating for me now learning of him. Here with Hack-O-Lantern, he has a very eccentric horror film, lost in the shuffle of so many that came out in the eighties, an era of very eccentric horror films, setting in the idyllic prologue a melodrama where a daughter wants her children to have nothing to do with her father.

Said Grandfather (Hy Pyke) also happens to be a Satanist, so she has a reason to be concerned, driving around in his pick-up full of pumpkins in the back with evil intent, grooming one of his grandsons Tommy to follow his lead to join his Satanic cult. A gravel voiced man, he also sired said son with his own daughter, and killed her husband, so he is not a very nice man.

Yet Hack-O-Lantern is a broad film in tone. One which leans on the slasher genre by the end more but is also one which meanders with charm at its own pace, a intersected by very gory death scenes, including a lot of garden tools to the head, and some titillation through nudity. It is also a film that not only shows someone is evil, when Tommy grows up, because he lays about listening to heavy metal, but that this leads to one of Hack-O-Lantern's main traits, abrupt tangents like when we are led into a music-video-with-a-dream for a song called "Devil's Slut". One with a female vocalist and a female figure in stereotypical tribal dress with eye lasers, her aesthetic in mind to the director's upbringing as she does briefly posses multiple limbs like a Hindu deity at one point. In what you could show on MTV baring the gore¹, it opens up the goofiness of the production, these tangents after this first major one here opening the film up considerably.

This is not a problem, and in fact, it becomes an interesting balance between a more lurid film from the era, splicing the gore and nudity between the plot, and its lengthy tangents to a plot that drifts along languidly. You can perfectly mark this contest with a scene of Tommy's sister in the bath, her female friend playing a prank with a plastic spider, as you realise it is not a sponge when you grab something to wash yourself. A film like this is as much a pleasure as a time piece, spotting a poster for Dead-End Drive-In (1986) and seeing a George Killian's Irish Red ad, wondering what it is, whether it is alcoholic, and whether you could still acquire one to try. It has one huge virtue as a film at least - that character actor Hy Pyke as Satanic Grandpa is compelling, in manner but even just in a voice of a man who gargled gravel as a habit since his youth.  

Beyond that, it is charming in its unexpected aspects. Some may find an extending stripping scene pointless or crass, in the midst of the Halloween part for the finale when a viewer might be expecting escalation, but considering the amount of films which prove plot is not necessarily going to achieve good quality, nor my greatest interest in cinema, stuff like this (and the likelihood the actress was an actual exotic dancer doing her actual day job) adds a sense of whimsy. Others part of the narrative are things which are unexpected but further Hack-O-Lantern's charm, such as when a blossoming romance transpires between main characters, Mrs. Mary Norton's grave of all places in the cemetery is when a couple decide to have hanky panky behind.

It even has a sense of actual drama by its conclusion. The one aspect of Hack-O-Lantern which is remotely consistent is not the horror but this being a tragedy about a mother destroyed by her own father, with her children effected or corrupted by his influence by the end, becoming the real drive for a horror film that secretly is a ripe melodrama of interest. Even if the film is not one of the best of even this era, it was rewarding for this reason amongst other details.   

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1) Though if your fantasy ends with your severed head being held aloft, creating the image for your film's VHS cover, you have issues you need to get help for.