It was October in July for me with my latest marathon of movies, making for three more films to add to the complete holiday horror page.
CAMP PLEASANT LAKE (2024)
This campground slasher has a very early 2000s direct-to-DVD vibe. Oddly, it’s not a summer camp movie, but actually takes place at Halloween time…even though there isn’t a pumpkin or colorful fall tree in sight at the camp.
Michael Pare stars as a man who is opening a horror movie experience camp with his wife. I’m not sure if this is a test run or mostly just training for the employees, but there are literally dozens of people there and seemingly no plan of action.
The group gathers for a campfire story, which gives us a lengthy backstory sequence about a girl who went with her family to the camp years before for Halloween then walked off into the woods with a stranger and was never seen again.
Now, a killer in a mask and hoodie starts killing the people at the camp, and of course each time someone is killed, the others all think it is part of the experience.
Unfortunately, there are very few individual kills. I kid you not when I tell you there are three different scenes in which everyone is sitting around outside talking and the killer strolls on over to hack up a chunk of people while the others just laugh thinking it’s part of the experience. Which begs the question, what happens to all the dead bodies once the killer walks off?
It’s pretty bad, but it definitely has plenty of kills…
OCTOBERFEST (2018)
This 69-minute found footage movie is as low budget and as unplanned as you can get, and I’m only mentioning it because it has a Halloween theme.
For the first 14 minutes we are subjected to trailers for the director’s other no budget flix. One even “borrows” the soundtrack from the original A Nightmare On Elm Street. Not to mention, damaged film effects are applied, obscuring parts of the trailers, which seems kind of antithetical to promoting your movies.
After that it’s endless, unfocused, random footage of a dude hanging out with his friends at school, talking about sex, and grabbing his crotch. There is no story because you can’t even hear the dialogue…but at least there’s a butt shot for character development. Sigh.
Eventually we know it’s Halloween because there’s footage of the main guy going through a haunted attraction and visiting the Halloween section of a store (Home Depot is my guess, because I recognized the big animatronic werewolf they carry). Even so, I’m pretty sure there’s a fleeting shot outside his school where you can see small clumps of snow on the ground.
In the end he’s in a house, not turning on any lights, and getting scared by silly CGI ghosts that look like they were made on a Windows XP computer circa 2002. I’m not sure why he doesn’t just leave the house. The scene goes on for quite a while, and eventually I think we are left with the sounds of him being eaten by something.
KKKILLERS (2018)
This 76-minute movie comes from the director of Octoberfest, but is it the better of the two flicks?
For starters, we again get a chunk of trailers, but only a few minutes, not fourteen. The movie begins with someone sitting in an audience filming a play, and once again, you can’t hear any of the dialogue. Sigh.
There’s a promise of a social commentary here, with footage of the KKK and cross burning while a voiceover says that the law protects minorities and whites are the victims. It would be great if the film had used the frightening concept that people dressed in white sheets and hoods are going out killing minorities on Halloween night, but instead, the director muddies the waters by throwing in random masked killers from his other movies instead. Sigh.
There’s an underlying story of a dude who has just been to the reading of his dad’s will and found out his woman is pregnant. It all seems pretty irrelevant as we just get various sequences of people being terrorized by the masked killers (from the other movies), along with this masked person who looks like one of The Strangers decided to go retro 80s with a hoodie covered in pins.
There’s some great Halloween atmosphere at times, the film is drenched in an orange tint, and some of the sequences are genuinely creepy when taken on their own. It would almost have been more effective if any attempt at plot had been discarded and we were just treated to a montage of the creepy chase scenes and kills like some sort Halloween slasher version of The Ring video. Although, when it comes down to it, that’s mostly what this is.
The highlight for me is that the main guy finds himself embroiled in some sort of satanic stuff, and for whatever reason ends up shirtless with a pentagram on his chest for the final act. Hot. Now this is how to end a no budget horror movie to satisfy a gay dude. It’s also how a gay dude ends his post about a no budget horror movie.
