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Vernon is a loud, yet somehow charming, blowhard who’s rarely thinking of anything beyond chicks and fun. Much to his chagrin, the rest of his family has recently taken up a renewed enthusiasm for God and church. This wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t want him to come to church with them on Halloween, the night he intends to have his friends over to his house for an all-night scary movie fest.
After school, he heads home to take a nap so that he can be rested for his big night. On the porch, he has a run-in with his father, who still wants him to cancel the party. Unwilling to be swayed, Vernon shrugs him off and goes into take his nap.
After his power nap, he awakes refreshed when his friends come over and they quickly take the party into the basement, where the DVD player is all cued up to begin the night of chills and thrills. Vernon makes sure he’s close to one of his female friends, in case she should be overcome with fright…or just take a sudden interest in being physical with Vernon by the light of the television glow.
However, everything gets a little strange when, after a few hours, the power suddenly goes out. While the power going out is a little weird, things get all out bizarre when Mr. Townsend, a teacher from the kids’ high school, suddenly shows up in their midst with a smoky lantern. When queried as to why he’s there, he explains that their father sent him down. A little confused by this, they become even more confused when their teacher begins to prey upon their weaknesses, trying to get them to follow him. To one, he offers attractive women, while, to another, he reminds her of her right to be furious about injustice. As he begins to break each teenager down, Vernon begins to realize that Mr. Townsend isn’t what he thought he was.
Content
While this movie does have some issues with both visual and audio problems, which I will get into later, it actually had quite a refreshingly original feel to its content. On one hand, this is a somewhat traditional tale of God vs. Satan on Halloween, while, on the other hand, it stays with a more general theme of good vs. evil without getting overly preachy. Additionally, the twists and turns in the storyline stay interesting enough for you to want to see what’s going on until the end, making it a good suspense tale, which is also very hard to pull off. I felt Mr. Williams did a good job of walking the fine line necessary to pull off both of these objectives.
In addition to good overall writing and pacing, the acting was quite good. While Vernon got a little repetitive in his oral confrontation with Mr. Townsend toward the end, his acting stayed consistently on target throughout the film. The other actors also did a very consistent job of feeling authentic.
Visual Look
The visual look of this film was a mixed bag, but, luckily, it was mixed with more positive elements than negative elements.
To begin with, the camerawork was all quite decent. Much of it was handheld, but was pretty smooth and didn’t jar the eye. The editing was also quite good, with a good overall pacing to the cutting of the picture. The lighting was quite decent, although the television light and the blue light used when the lights went out were a bit too blue. A little softer grade blue filter would soften this effect. (The amount that’s often used in night filming is a light filter called ¼” blue, which can be purchased relatively cheaply.)
Now we get to the part of the film that was the biggest mixed bag because of the risks Mr. Williams took. He decided to try his hand at a number of special effects. To begin with, to show accelerated time, he made clouds whip across the sky as the sun set. Unfortunately, rather than shooting this with his camcorder and accelerating it after the fact, he rendered out a 3D version of clouds, with a lens flare as the sun. While 3D rendering is getting better and better all the time at the no-budget level, it wasn’t good enough in this situation for us to believe it was real. The big thing to always remember when doing effects is to ask yourself if there is a simpler, more realistic way to do them. This issue cropped up later when we see a push in on a 3D model of the Earth and a pan across a 3D ocean. The earth could have simply been a pan across a photograph and the ocean could have been shot at a lake. Both of these would have been simpler and looked more realistic.
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