The Unseen (1980) dir. Danny Steinmann

Logline: After arriving to cover the local holiday parade, a freelance reporter, Jennifer (Barabara Bach), and her two gal pals find themselves stranded in a small town with no vacant motel rooms. By chance they run into an over-friendly museum owner, Ernest (Sydney Lassick), who-- upon hearing their predicament-- all too eagerly invites the trio to spend the night in the home he shares with his sister, Virginia (Lelia Goldini). Thinking they've caught a break, the three young women have in fact caught their own collective doom, courtesy of something Ernest and Virginia have been keeping locked in the basement for twenty years...

Crime in the Past: A brother and a sister love one another, or perhaps they just got bored one day twenty years previous. Brother + Sister = Mutant baby. In some small towns, it is exactly this equation that basements are constructed in preparation for. "Rural playpens," they're called, or so I've heard.

Bodycount: 4, never to be seen or unseen again.

Themes/Moral Code: It's a film about parenting, both good and bad, and how our actions as parents and our genetic predispositions warp our poor offspring into terrible mutant beasts. Obviously, the film is critical of Ernest and Virginia Keller's incestual relationship, as we see from the fact that it results in the birth of a horrifically deformed child. But, on the other hand, the film isn't exclusively shaming backwoods mating habits: the Kellers's monstrous son is essentially a loving and obedient child towards his parents, and it can be argued that only their lifelong neglect of him and his emotional needs drives him to twisted behavior. Though his is a twisted behavior that is, not coincidentally, much like that of his perverted father's. Consequent of this uncertainty over the killer child's behavioral origin, we've got threads of the "nature vs. nurture" debate running underneath the film's action throughout, all of which come to a head in Jennifer's predicament: she's pregnant with the child of her violently abusive boyfriend, and she must decide whether or not she wants to keep the child and risk seeing what sort of person that child grows up to be. Prior to her harrowing encounter with Ernest and Virginia's offspring, Jennifer appears resolved to carry her child to term (witness her crumpling up her abortion prescription), but the last act of the movie gives her an experience in the trials of parenting that should raise some doubts in her mind. Placed in seclusion with the film's childlike killer, Jennifer attempts to become a surrogate mother to him in order to save her own hide, and she finds her trial run at parenting to be a mixed bag. Her stern, motherly affection can hold the childish monster in place momentarily, but not forever, as eventually the bestial instincts win out. Jennifer learns that raising children is , well, tough and that-- despite all of one's efforts to the contrary-- the kid still might grow up to be a fiend. Neither genetic parentage nor careful parenting are any guarantee. Abortion at least provides some certainty.

Killer's Motivation: One of slasherdom's more sympathetic villains, our mutant killer, "Junior" Keller (Stephen Furst), can't help his murderous predilections. A deformed, mentally impaired child in a watery-eyed adult's body, Junior acts on impulse, and unfortunately those impulses result in him collecting and handling the bodies of human women as if they were dolls (we see that the boy loves stuffed animals, but he's obviously never been taught how to care for his possessions, particularly those that writhe around and scream in protest). As for a deeper subconscious motivation, it's apparent that Junior has been physically and emotionally abused through his lifelong imprisonment in the Kellers's basement, so that might be one cause of his psychosis. But a second explanation seems both simpler and more poignant: Junior displays that he's a Momma's Boy through his actions in the final act, but, because he's been ignored and neglected by his traumatized mother throughout his existence, his desire for love manifests itself only as simultaneous violence and affection against the various mother proxies he encounters (i.e. any fertile female). The boy probably just needed a hug somewhere along the line.

Final Girl: Barbara Bach's Jennifer is a successful news reporter whose independence and self-determination in her career bleed over into her personal life. At the beginning of the film, we witness her leaving her abusive pro football player boyfriend, Tony (Douglas Barr), whose obsession with recovering from an ankle injury has transformed him into a frustrated, woman-beating prick. When he follows her to the small town that her assignment takes her to and tries to confront her about their relationship "problems," Jennifer greets him with the quip, "Beat up any more women today?" But despite Jennifer's seeming flippancy towards her recent ex-lover, the break isn't as clean as she might wish: she's pregnant with his child. Through the character of Jennifer we see society's desire to squash the individual played out under the auspices of conforming to traditional gender roles and family models. Jennifer cares much more about her career and personal goals, stating that she might one day wish to start a family, but certainly not today. But it ain't that easy.

The societal pressures from those around Jennifer-- Tony acting as their chief representative-- encouraging her to abandon those independent desires and become a selfless mother are palpable, creating uncertainty within Jennifer's mind about what actions she should take. Her horrific experience with Junior Keller is, in a way, her maternity trial period. While she shows resourcefulness in dealing with the dangerously childish Junior, she also demonstrates that she's not quite prime mother material. She's revolted by her proxy "child" and the maternal responsibility she must take on as a burden in order to survive: for Jennifer, motherhood is clearly lacking in those profound, instinctual joys that our family-oriented culture assures us exist for everyone. Which direction she ultimately chooses between independence and motherhood is left unresolved by the film, and this omission feels like a significant flaw. Nonetheless, it's quite telling that the strongest image of mothering the film provides us is that of a regretful mother cradling her child for the first and only time as he lies on the ground as a corpse. Not every person is capable, ready, or interested in becoming a parent, society. Look what happens when you force the point.

Evaluation: The Unseen is a peculiar but awfully entertaining quasi-slasher/basement mutant thriller from director Danny Steinmann, he of the leather-clad Linda Blair rape-revenge epic Savage Streets (1984) and my second favorite but first weirdest entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, Part V: A New Beginning (1985). Those films having been produced later than this one, we can consider The Unseen as being Steinmann's humble beginnings (so humble, in fact, that he took his name off the finished film in shame. The film's direction is credited to the nonexistent 'Peter Foleg'). But there's nothing one wishes could remain unseen here: carried by its histrionic performances, clothespin-eroticism, and a smattering of sleaze, the film works despite an unnecessarily drawn-out third act that doubles as a tedious crash-course in demented parenting. Slasher devotees will be-- if not pleased-- at least appreciative of the film's creative mining of various trademarks of the subgenre placed into a rural Gothic context, from a faceless killer messily dispatching young women from out of frame down to the final girl's shock discovery of her companions' arranged corpses.

Nightmares (1980) dir. John D. Lamond

a.k.a. Stagefright

Logline: The cast of a pretentious theatrical farce are being picked off by a killer with an affection for pointy shards of broken glass. When all is said and done and the bodies are cleared from the stage, Melbourne's theater community will never be the same. The quips, at any rate, will be much less pithy.

Crime in the Past: Imagine seeing your mother have sex with a man who is not your father on January 26th, 1963. Then imagine, on February 23rd of that same year, seeing your mom felt up by that same man in the front seat of a car after you wake up from being asleep in the back. Upset, you might then inadvertently cause the car to crash, sending your mother flying partially through the windshield. Seeing your mother in physical distress, you might then also give her legs a few pulls, accidentally ripping her throat open and causing her to bleed to death in the process. Imagine then waking up hours later in the hospital and overhearing your father calling you a murderer. Imagine shortly thereafter being assaulted by a lascivious, pedophilic hospital orderly and saving yourself only by shoving a nearby shard of glass deep into his neck. Imagine all that, and you'd probably start stabbing random people with nearby shards of glass twenty years after the fact, too.

Bodycount: 11 budding thespians receive some career-killing reviews.

Themes/Moral Code: There is, for obviously traumatic reasons, the standard "sex = death" morality at play here. Seeing, as a youngster, her mother groped shortly before her bloody expiration, our demented serial murderess, Helen (Jenny Neumann), tends to associate the two bodily states. This association leads Helen to committing many acts of castration and the tearing of breasts with aid of pointy glass shards whenever she sees her co-stars getting randy behind the curtain. And, naturally, in the theatre community of Melbourne, everyone is sleeping with everyone on the sly, so Helen has much sin to vanquish (i.e. stab repeatedly). In fact, the film devotes a good amount of its running time (though perhaps not enough) to skewering the theatre scene. The theatre directors, actors, and critics we see parading about the film expressing ludicrously inflated senses of their own artistic import are good for some chuckles (they speak of their slapstick stage comedy about death in terms befitting Brecht), but ultimately one wishes the film had developed this notion further by tying it more closely to the motivations underlying its slasher plot. Sure,  by the film's conclusion Helen has risen in the ranks of Melbourne's crop of actors because the majority of her top competition is laid up in pieces at the morgue, but this seems more a fringe benefit of her psychopathy than a pointed jab at the ruthlessness of a corrupt and attention-hungry artistic community.

Killer's Motivation: Helen sees sex, then sees shards of glass conveniently nearby. Helen kills. Her choice of weapon is rooted in the early childhood trauma of inadvertently ripping her own mother's throat open with jagged shards of car windshield glass. This early act of violence was obviously accidental, but her devastated father's insistence in the hospital soon after the incident that she's a murderer appears to take hold of her vulnerable psyche: maybe, after all, she intended to kill her mother for her cheating ways, and maybe she can reenact the murder time and time again with her new victims and, by taking a deliberate roll in the murdering this time, fulfill her father's labeling of her. Maybe. The film inexplicably treats Helen's identity as the killer as a mystery throughout, in a storytelling choice akin to that made in a hypothetical episode of Scooby Doo that pretends that the only other person in the creepy, cobwebbed theater other than the Mystery Inc. gang couldn't possibly be a suspect responsible for the ghoul in the big rubber costume.

Final Girl: One of those rare instances in which our final girl is also our killer. Helen's mania finds her wandering around in a totally and obviously deranged state, constantly muttering in various voices to herself while in the general vicinity of others: one wonders if her oblivious cast mates simply mistake her for a dedicated method actor. Helen's psychological complications and sexual hang-ups have a certain simplicity to them for the most part (she's never had a boyfriend before, she's never been allowed to have a boyfriend before, she's plagued by memories of her dead mother having sex, and she's incapable of being touched, which also reminds her of her mother), but these personality quirks vanish after she's completed the bulk of her murdering, allowing her to have one spirited romp in the sack with her new sort-of boyfriend, Terry (Gary Sweet), before framing him for her crimes. One's mother-proxy-murdering work is never done.

Evaluation: An Aussie slasher that punctuates its many sequences of drawn-out wandering killer-POV with explicit close-ups of labia majora, Nightmares has something for everyone. What's a rather enjoyable but undeniably by-the-numbers slasher contains-- if you peel back the festering skin a bit-- some rather surprising bits of sleaziness. Besides the videographic lessons in female anatomy, viewers bear witness to genital mutilation, talk of a character's "big brown freckle," and a rather queasy scene in which a victim vomits all over himself while being attacked by the killer. These are unusual, if not entirely admirable, moments in a film so very typical in every other respect. Lead actress Jenny Neumann would go on to be more captivating as a severed head in slasher semi-gem Hell Night (1981) the very next year. Though worth the marginal experience it provides for the slasher devout, the film's most amusing moment arrives early, during its opening credits no less, when the text informs us that director John D. Lamond is being credited with the script's "original idea."

Hide and Go Shriek (1988) dir. Skip Schoolnik

Logline: A quartet of recently graduated teenage couples decide to bid adieu to high school by staying overnight in a furniture store and committing grievous acts of furniture-supported hanky panky. But when the couples begin to permanently disappear during a game of hide and go seek, those remaining begin to ponder whether or not the creepy ex-convict nightwatchman is more dangerous than he seems...

Crime in the Past: The crime here is twofold, though neither involves the sort of early trauma we're used to seeing as slasher audiences. First, we learn that ex-con nightwatchman Fred (Jeff Levine) was previously incarcerated for armed robbery, which sets him up nicely as our red herring, especially when we notice that the actual killer bears similar prison tattoos. However, this literal crime is not the figurative crime we're looking for: the actual crime is that of a broken heart. It seems that Fred's homosexual prison liaison only suited him when behind bars, and his rejection of his male lover on the outside left that lover hopelessly devoted without romantic reciprocation, driving him to derangement.

Bodycount: 7 souls plopped down onto soiled display mattresses for the last time.

Themes/Moral Code: Whether consciously or not, slasher films have always attacked what they deem to be "perversions" of the norm, but it's not often that one of them gets any more specific than railing against the actions of horny teenagers. Hide and Go Shriek, however, gets awfully specific when illuminating its perceived perversion by using its bloody mayhem to prop up a heteronormative worldview that vilifies homosexuality. This vilification is accomplished primarily through the revelation of the killer and his motive (discussed below), but also through the film's handling of a character who repents for his past homosexual leanings. While imprisoned due to an armed robbery conviction, creepy nightwatchman Fred carried on a happy relationship with his cellmate, Zack (Scott Kubay). Upon their release from prison, Zack attempted to get back into contact with Fred, whom he had seemingly grown to love. Fred was repulsed by the notion of reigniting their romance outside of prison, telling Zack that whatever was between them was merely a product of their shared situation. Fred's implication is that in the real world people are heterosexual, regardless of what they do behind locked cell doors. Fred's reasoning doesn't sit well with Zack, nor should it: it's total hooey.

What's interesting is that the film doesn't attempt to make us feel sympathy for the abandoned lover, but for the schmuck who denies his own sexuality and carries out the abandonment. When Fred lays out the preceding details in front of Zack and the surviving teens during the film's climax, he transforms, instantaneously, from a mute, creepy, grunting potential fiend into a poor, unfortunate soul who has been misled but is seeking forgiveness for his sexual transgressions. He's made into a sort of tragic hero and protector of our protagonists-- if only momentarily-- for rejecting his homosexual impulse while his spurned gay lover remains a frothing maniac. It's an unfortunate fact that even as late as 1988 homosexuals were being openly demonized in visible works of popular culture, with a work like Hide and Go Shriek contributing in its own less-than-subtle way by harmfully impressing into the minds of its young audience the notion that those folks who prefer their own sex are a breed of boogeymen indistinct from a Myers or a Voorhees.

Killer's Motivation: Zack kills the teens because he doesn't want anyone or anything to come between him and Fred, his former lover. The fact that the teens are merely occupying the same building as Fred and are in no way interfering in the rekindling of the prison lovers' relationship is irrelevant because Zack is certifiably insane. There's two ways of taking this: either Zack is a heterosexual man whose prison experience created his "unnatural" homosexual passion for Fred and thus drove him to insanity or Zack is a homosexual man who is "naturally" insane. The former interpretation could be supported by Zack's failed opening encounter with a female prostitute, while the latter could be supported by (in the movie's logic) his effeminate characteristics (like giggling!) and penchant for cross-dressing. Either explanation signals that the film is lacking a certain, shall we say, sophistication in its understanding of sexuality and gender. It's a little bit like director Skip Schoolnik and his writer Michael Kelly watched Glen or Glenda (1953) and mistook it for a horror movie.

Final Girl: Hide and Go Shriek ignores the slasher convention of having an innocent, virginal final girl as the massacre's lone survivor, which seems curious considering its otherwise conservative approach to morality. Instead, a whopping two out of the four couples survive the grisly events, but for no particular reason other than perhaps the heteronormative nature of their sexual encounters, which the film clearly favors. All of the film's teen women are topless and horny at one point or another and their deaths don't directly correspond to what they choose to do with their private parts in their spare time. The film does feature an (at least initially) virginal female, but when she performs a slinky striptease for her boyfriend (that she saw "in a porno movie," she tells him) before bedding him, we can feel confident in saying she doesn't quite fit the archetype. That the film allows her and her boyfriend to walk out alive is to its credit, despite its more troubling perspectives.

Evaluation: A mostly unmemorable late entry in the subgenre, Hide and Go Shriek nevertheless provides some small interest for slasher aficionados. Its dopey teens are fun enough to laugh at, its fixation on creepy mannequins is almost unnerving, and its gore is on par with some of the scrappy best that the subgenre has to offer (a glorious elevator decapitation is a highlight). And, as is the case with so many bottom of the barrel slashers, it's hard not to admire its thrift: the characters' near inaudible dialogue echoes in all scenes because of cheap sets and improperly placed boom mics, and-- best of all-- a sound-alike version of "Walk This Way" is used for a musical cue after a lame "Walk This Way" joke in order to avoid licensing fees. The film, like character Randy's $6 haircut, is far from stylish, but it won't leave you scarred with any serious pangs of 1980s flashback embarrassment. Director Skip Schoolnik remains active as a TV producer, but his only directing credits after this film are a handful of episodes of the Buffy spin-off Angel and the "true story" reenactment anthology guessing game Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. Pair Hide and Go Shriek with Chopping Mall (1986) for a night of off-kilter slashers set in furniture stores.

The Mutilator (1985) dir. Buddy Cooper

Logline: Three college couples head off to a beach condo belonging to the estranged father of one member of their group for some rest and relaxation during their fall break from classes. In-between all the Monopoly and hanky-panky, a madman with a (literal) axe to grind begins to stalk them, hoping to add their corpses to his collection of macabre trophies.

Crime in the Past: While his mother is decorating a cake in the kitchen, a young boy decides that he'll clean his father's prized rifle collection as a birthday present to his progenitor. You can imagine where this goes from here. When the father returns home and discovers the lifeless body of his accidentally blasted wife, he gives his boy a few whacks before settling into a lifelong case of severe alcoholism and psychosis.

Bodycount: 7 go bye bye, as does a stout, middle-aged police officer's leg, which he shouldn't have so carelessly misplaced. R.I.P. LEG.

Themes/Moral Code: The Mutilator is no multi-layered slasher epic, but it does feature a surprising structural unity. All of its characters-- villain and victim alike-- appear preoccupied with games of skill and dominance. Games are all over the film, fused to every stock slasher situation: witness a sexy skinny dipping session turn into a game of tag. But whether it be setting the new high score on an arcade game, owning all the property in Monopoly, or besting all the competition in an accuracy contest, the aim of each game we see or hear of in the film is proving one person's superiority over another. This emphasis on gaming becomes interesting when juxtaposed against the killer's obsession with hunting and fishing, which are themselves games of dominance over nature and other living beings. Through oblique references to Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" ("he hunted everything but man," one character says in reference to the killer), the film hints that the killer may be-- in his mind-- making these young men and women his game (as in hunted animals; the killer actually hangs them up like taxidermied trophies after killing them, as seen in the above poster.). We see how easily an environment that defines itself through frivolous games of skill can be twisted into something deadly by a warped mind: this notion is perfectly encapsulated by a scene in which our victims are playing a game of blind man's buff at the same time that the killer is stalking them throughout the house, making him, in essence, an unwitting player, though in a much severer game. The film doesn't do enough to tie these thematic threads into the overall tale, but they pervade nonetheless.

The film's moral code, on the other hand, is standard issue "sex = death." The skinny dipping couple (one of whom is the ludicrously pretty Frances Raines, star of earlier wacko slasher Disconnected (1983)) die first, followed soon after by the couple hoping to get it on after they investigate whether or not they locked the house up (amateur mistake). The only couple spared by the film's end is that constituted by our hero and heroine, who can be seen lying chastely side by side, fully-clothed, whenever they're in bed together. What distinguishes The Mutilator from the countless other slasher films that conform to this code is-- in one particular instance-- the horrific severity with which it deals out its moral judgement upon the transgressor. Though most of the film's kills feature a bit of oozing gore courtesy of the makeup department, the demise reserved for Sue (Connie Rogers) is unfathomably ghastly, standing in queasy opposition to the film's otherwise rather jolly tone. The killer hauls her onto a wooden table in the condo's garage and, having her pinned down, stabs a menacing fishing gaff into her crotch, up through her vagina, and out through her womb. This sexualized violence is stomach-turning. It reveals the often barely concealed contempt the culture had (and undoubtedly still has) for sexually active women: the punishment they receive in morally conservative slasher films like this is often far out of balance with that received by their male counterparts. (Sue's boyfriend, Ralph (Bill Hitchcock), gets a comparatively gentle pitchfork to the throat.)

Killer's Motivation: The killer, Jack (Jack Chatham), is the widowed father of the trigger happy Ed (Matt Mitler), one of our college kids heroes. It seems that Jack still holds a grudge against Ed for accidentally shooting his wife to death, as he invites Ed and his friends to the condo under false pretenses so that he can anonymously hunt them and exact his revenge. Though we know he's the culprit from early on, Jack is mute throughout the film, so never exactly spills the beans about his motivation verbally. Luckily, we are privy to his subconscious mind when he's taking a nap in the garage, and in his dream fantasies we see him variously shooting and strangling Ed when he was a little boy. The demented gamesman and moral executioner personas certainly figure into Jack's motivation, but primarily he's a sad, angry, and drunken father.

Final Girl: The final girl is Pam (Ruth Martinez), Ed's girlfriend. On the one hand, she's totally typical of her type: prudish when it comes to sexual matters, hesitant of any risky shenanigans, and eager to contact the police at the soonest possible sign of something being awry. But, then, she's also distinct in several keys ways from the bulk of her predecessors in the role of 'final girl.' Pam demonstrates early on that's she's pretty tough when she tosses Ralph to the ground and restrains him when he won't stop teasing her, and similar physical skills are put into effect during her climactic struggle with the killer, Jack. While the wounded Ed sits around meekly watching and sobbing, Pam tussles with Jack, eventually stabbing him and then crushing him between the rear bumper of a car and a brick wall. Her physical resilience in an adverse situation puts her helpless boyfriend to shame, and that's a pretty neat twist on the usual damsel in distress routine. Regardless, Pam is still a little bland (the most we ever learn about her is that "lightning is not one of [her] favorite things"), and the film isn't willing to make her-- a mere woman-- a totally competent character: despite all her other fine abilities, she can't seem to start a car for the life of her.

Evaluation: By the mid-'80s, the slasher subgenre had become so supersaturated that its next stop could only be self-parody. The mainstream examples of this retreat into lightheartedness would be films like April Fool's Day (1986) and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), but Buddy Cooper's The Mutilator, a no-budget video gem, would beat those major studio efforts to the punch by at least a year. It's a goofy but endearing jaunt into tonal madness, replete in equal measure with Benny Hill-style sped-up slapstick and human evisceration. Sometimes, the slapstick and horror are even present simultaneously, like during Mike's (Morey Lampley) death scene, which reaches Paul Reubens-levels of protraction. It's hard to frown at a film that plays a jaunty sax and piano ditty titled "Fall Break" as its bloody-fonted "The Mutilator" title card pops up on screen during the opening credits. How much of this juxtaposed absurdity was intentional is of course up for debate, but Cooper and Company (including the film's many non-actors, who walk around their scenes with corny grins plastered permanently across their faces) seem aware of what they're doing. And it's not often that a straight-faced slasher ends with a blooper reel over its closing credits. Even less often that that blooper reel begins with a flubbed child strangulation. The Mutilator is unique in that way.

WNUF Halloween Special (2013) dir. Chris LaMartina

Logline: Halloween, 1987: Local television station WNUF sent a field reporter and a team of experts into the abandoned Webber House, site of the horrific Spirit Board Murders several decades prior, to broadcast a live television special that would confirm or put to rest the ceaseless rumors of the house's alleged haunting. The reporter and his team were never seen again. The television special presented to you is exactly what hit the airwaves on 10/31/1987, unedited and salvaged from the recycling bin of time.

A nostalgia project with an uncommon quaintness in its approach to reconstructing wistful approximations of yesteryear, the WNUF Halloween Special is also an aesthetic artifact of a cultural practice that's been lost to lossless encodes and streaming media in the cloud: the film is (at the moment) only available as a limited edition VHS tape, scribbled on with a felt tip marker and then shoved into an unadorned sleeve, as if it had been recorded off the television screen by a fellow discerning viewer as it aired and then exchanged discretely among like-minded friends or mailed to your doorstep through the machinations of some illicit underground bootleg service. Degraded, snowed-out magnetic tape recordings of television broadcasts (be they movies, television programs, marathons, or specials) were, for those of us who were children in the years before commercial home video became an affordable obsession, the stuff we were weaned on. Perhaps the most admirable quality of Chris LaMartina's faux found footage film is its devotion to recreating that singular viewing experience, annoyances and all, down to the commercial interruptions every couple minutes, irritating station call letter jingles, and that ad for the carpet warehouse that seems to never stop running. Considering the fact that these commercials make up the bulk of the film's length, it's to the filmmakers' credit that they're never a chore to watch and that-- barring a few promos for obviously nonexistent syndicated '80s TV series-- they rarely violate the appearance of verisimilitude. (Having fed her the phony story of the special's history and left off the fact of its more recent vintage, my partner discerned that the bloody special itself was staged but failed to suspect that it wasn't a genuine article of 1980s television.) 

Necessarily, the plot of the WNUF Halloween Special is secondary to the experience itself. As the tape rolls, we're greeted at first by a pair of cloyingly bubbly news anchors in costume on that specialist of days in 1987. This insipid, charmingly hokey duo introduce a few local interest pieces with holiday twists (like that of a local dentist who's running a candy buyback program) while teasing the start of the titular WNUF Halloween Special, which will see brash reporter Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf) and a team of paranormal investigators enter an allegedly haunted house in the hope of discovering the truth about its ghostly rumors. (An inspiration for LaMartina and his collaborators may have been the excellent Morton Downey Jr.-starring episode of Tales from the Crypt, "Television Terror," which bears a remarkably similar plot and also partially employs the found footage medium to tell its tale.) WNUF doesn't work as a film, but why should it? Was your town's local holiday news special ever worthy of the multiplexes? The moments in the film that most find their mark are those in which the ornery Frank Stewart interviews the assembled costumed audience for some unintentionally awkward local flavor. It feels trite to say, but WNUF succeeds in reminding us of, if not a simpler time, a slightly more innocent time in American history, when-- as various pretend commercials remind us-- we encouraged grown men to be big buddies to small boys, the Twins Towers still stood, and the biggest evil that the religious right saw itself fit to combat was the pagan ritual of one dark night in October. It's Ghostwatch (1992) for us Yanks, but-- unlike that artfully executed primetime ruse-- it's less attempting to play a trick on us than it is reassuring us that it loves our childhood, too.