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A lunatic momma's boy creatively dispatches some local frat members 
after the ill-fated students hold a fund-raising haunted house in an abandoned homestead tucked back in the woods of Kentucky.I'm unsure if the concept of "regional" horror cinema actually exists. Regionalism in literature is utilizing and letting what makes specific (
generally southern) areas of the United States unique speak through the words--like the dialects of the characters and comments on slavery in Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Huckberry Finn. Though when it comes to horror flicks, "regionalism" seems something totally vague.
Region-specific horror tends to be obscure, no budget curiosities hailing from the South and Midwest. Stuff like
The Abomination (1986) and
Ozone: Attack of the Redneck Mutants (1986). If an example becomes too popular, like being distributed to video stores outside the cluster surrounding its native state, the denotation is stripped away. Kinda like the highbrow status of
The Blair Witch Project that simply wouldn't have been without 82% of the U.S. population seeing it. It's essentially the type of independent one-off horror that is either forgotten or referred to with a chuckle within the small communities that spawned them.
This extremely hard-to-find 1991 Kentuckian number mostly made by students of
WKU and residents of
Bowling Green is surprisingly okay. The slasher subgenre had long been dead by the dawn of the '90s, but
Hauntedween adheres its tried-and-true language well enough. A masked killer with an opening flashback of a horrible incident that directly ties to the maniac's motivation. A hillbilly-accented minor character solely in place for comic relief. A few sets of boobs (
some not terribly appealing), some blood, and sex in the woods equaling immediate death. All pulled off with enough competence to often times feel like it "deserves" to be called a slasher despite its year of conception. That distinct "pulled-off-the-street" vibe usually in these fuck arounds never once creeps into any of the performances or execution.
The aspect that really hurts is one that is also shared by many muddling hack 'em ups. We spend far too much time with the going-ons of the young adults as they set up the event and the attractive male lead's trouble with his main squeeze. The killer is nearly entirely absent for well over a half an hour. Everything is saved for the climax which, while inventive, doesn't quite live up to its promise. I can't be too hard on
Hauntedween, there are much more well known slasher cheapies that aren't as decent when considering its origins. The whole outing could have easily been unwatchable, but everyone involved manage to keep the train on the tracks and check off enough clichés. One thing is for sure, I'd rather watch this again than
Crinoline Head ever again...
My copy is an $8 DVD-R from a guy currently selling them on eBay since the film was only released once on a very rare VHS. The picture quality is fine with a number of dropouts and rolls. The disc is correctly authored as a single layer DVD-5 with a high bitrate that nearly fills the disc at just under four gigs. Sound is Dolby stereo and eighteen chapter stops are included.
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