Wow, I’m noticing a trend. Lawrence is waxing nostalgic about The Lost Boys (review here) and Night of the Demons (review here) and I’ve got a copy of a "rarely-seen slasher sickie" (Anchor Bay’s words, not mine) spinning in my DVD-ROM drive as I take screencaps. It seemed like a good idea at the time when I spotted it on the shelf at Best Buy...here, we have a religious-themed slasher with Darren McGavin...oh, sweet nectar! Trash like this is my mother’s milk! Unfortunately, to paraphrase Lady Macbeth, this milk has turned to gall. Yecch.

I certainly had high hopes, as a flashback reveals young Henry Collins (an inexplicably top-billed Sam Rockwell) discovering the blood-soaked Father Malius (Charles Cragin, channeling equal parts Max Schreck and Robert Englund) knee-deep in the carcasses of his fraternity brothers. Twenty-five years later, Father Malius is still locked up in the same mental institution, the fraternity replaced all those dead members, and Sam Rockwell has transformed into Darren McGavin (speaking of McGavin, why haven’t they put The Night Stalker out on DVD yet? That show was syndicated bliss in my youth!), a retired cop.

Unfortunately for those wacky frat boys, tonight is Hell Night, and Linda Blair is nowhere in sight. Besides the usual ass-paddling, rounds of Soggy Biscuit, drunken date rape, and other collegiate monkeyshines, new frat pledges have to suffer through painful initiations, documented by Ned Bara, the local-access star (and perhaps lost Polonia Brother...look at this goon!). Determined to win the competition, the Phi Delta Kappa boys concoct the ultimate hazing prank: two pledges are sent into the asylum to photograph the notorious Father Malius. Unfortunately, they underestimate the resourcefulness of the demonic deacon, and the revenant reverend pulls a Thin Lizzy, and there’s a jailbreak. Of course, you can’t change a leopard’s spots or a maniacal pastor’s psychosis, so Malius makes a return visit to Phi Delta Kappa for a night of murder, mayhem, and shrill one-liners.

To put it crudely, Happy Hell Night is the cinematic equivalent of really bad sex. Sure, it’s not completely terrible (bad sex is better than no sex at all), but you find yourself thinking about other things the whole damn time to heighten your enjoyment of the current situation. It certainly doesn’t help that the movie itself is ridiculously derivative, pulling kills and scenes from plenty of other movies. When your movie isn’t as good as the original Halloween, tossing in the exact same shot as Michael Myers' nosedive in the last reel certainly doesn’t sweeten the deal. Not only that, but Father Malius isn’t a particularly inventive killer, almost exclusively using an ice-climber’s pick to spear co-eds (which is none-to-subtly foreshadowed), including a young Jorja Fox getting her brain spiked in a manner eerily similar to Daniela Doria in Fulci’s House By The Cemetery. It almost reeked of those "tribute films" (i.e. Cabin Fever) that are in vogue these days, but with much worse results.

Of course, there are a few times that HHN catches itself elevated above the overall crappiness. The camera flash-lit approach of Malius to one of the pledges, shaking off years of cobwebs as he lurches forward was damn cool, and the scene with Bara navigating the survivors through the darkened halls of the frat house from his bank of video monitors was a suspenseful, almost Aliens-esque sequence. Unfortunately, all the way up to the predictable finale, the movie just disappoints.

Only made 13 years ago, the print used by Anchor Bay for the DVD is expectedly good. Colors were dead on, blacks were deep and even, and print damage was virtually nonexistent. Grain speckled the picture at times, but that’s more the result of cheap film stock than Anchor Bay’s treatment. Sound was very clean and crisp, with no problems whatsoever, except for Father Malius’ one-liners being hard to understand. However, even in the finest mix on the planet, his chain-smoking E.T. voice would be incomprehensible. Extras, as expected with AB’s "budget" releases, include a trailer, and that’s it. At least they don’t include "scene selection" and "interactive menus" as a special feature anymore.

A while back, I reviewed an indie flick by Masimilliano Cerchi called Hellinger (review here), which I praised for its originality. Sadly, I see that there’s more than one black-eyed, ashen-faced killer priest out there. However, it doesn’t matter, as Happy Hell Night, despite being the precursor, is far inferior even to Cerchi’s SOV production, let alone the slasher classics it tries so hard to cling to the bloody coat-tails of.