Haddonfield Halloween – ‘Boo’, Review by Zoe

A group of college students get trapped in an abandoned, haunted hospital on Halloween. What could possibly go wrong here?

Two college guys decide to scare their girlfriends by rigging up some fake scares in a reputedly haunted abandoned hospital. Although one of the girls is reluctant at first (clearly having more than the requisite one brain cell) she eventually agrees. Once in there they meet up with another guy, Allan, who is searching for his sister, who disappeared when she went into the hospital with her friends two nights before. Also thrown into the mix is former Blaxploitation actor now cop Arlo Ray Baines who is there at the behest of Allan, his former partner’s son. Oh yeah, and there’s an evil ghost of a nasty child-murdering rapist who is trying to possess people in order to gain corporeal form and leave the hospital. PLUS there’s the ghost of the murdered little girl, hanging around creeping people out for no reason.

As ridiculous as that above plot summary sounds, that’s actually BETTER than the film itself, which is one of the worst ‘horror’ films I have seen in a long time. It was so bad that I nearly stopped watching it. If I hadn’t needed to write a review for Haddonfield Halloween I would probably have stopped the movie after the first 10 minutes, thrown something at the television and/or cancelled my subscription to Netflix and written them a very strongly worded letter on the quality of their programming.  Seriously this movie has NO redeeming qualities. None.

Well I want to say shockingly awful, but I think that would be slightly unfair on the actors, given the stupid plot and badly written lines they were given to work with.  But if you want me to provide an idea of the level of acting skill involved on a scale say from ‘just evolved from an amoeba, no idea what acting is’ up to ‘Anthony Hopkins at his prime’ we’re talking strictly ‘school students fucking about while high’ level. Strangely I have never heard of any of the actors in this film, meaning they never went on to bigger things…..how shocking.

What action? There really isn’t any. The potential creepy possibilities of an abandoned hospital were completely wasted by the piss-poor plot and shoddy direction. Seriously, there was not one single scare to be had here. It was THAT bad.

The special effects were truly awful and there is no excuse for this. Brilliant films like Dog Soldiers and Ginger Snaps have shown that you can do non CGI gore in an inexpensive but incredibly effective way as long as you have a little creativity. 

For some reason the ghost had issues with sustaining a human body once it had inhabited it, leading to some embarrassingly bad ‘melting’ scenes and a lot of people exploding like balloons when shot/stabbed etc. Now exploding like balloons makes it sound cooler than it was, we’re not talking ‘Scanners’ quality here, more like ‘two blokes in their backyard with nothing better to do and yesterday’s leftover meatloaf’ level.

Normally I would recommend people watch a film that’s bad, just for a laugh, but this one doesn’t even deserve one second of your time. It doesn’t even fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category. So do not watch. Even if Netflix lies to you and says it has three stars.