3) Hell Night (1981)

"Pray for day!"

Director
Tom DeSimone

Cast
Linda Blair - Marti
Vincent Van Patten - Seth
Peter Barton - Jeff
Kevin Brophy - Peter
Suki Goodwin - Denise


Hell Night. It's the perfect title. It's the slasher flick anyone would think of when they hear "slasher"; young college kids filled with booze and hormones being hazed by having to spend the night alone in a spooky abandoned house with large beds (wink, wink). This is quintessentially the horror hack and slash flick.
I see a little Friday the 13th in this movie, sprinkled with a few elements from The Shining.
It wouldn't surprise me if this movie helped set some horror stereotypes - useless cops, naïve kids, illicit sex, gore, and the maniac lurking in the shadow that the audience knows is going to kill someone. Just wait for it.
This flick isn't too obscure, but it's obscure enough to make it on this blog. Its biggest claim to fame has to be Linda Blair as its star. She's no stranger to hell and all that goes with it. Blair played the possessed Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973). And she has since received a Razzie Award for worst actress in this movie. Blair certainly was no stranger to bad movies at this time. She previously starred in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) - a movie much, much worse than Hell Night. It's a movie that has to be among the top five worst sequels ever made. 
It's safe to say that by 1981, Blair had a lot of hell going for her.
In Hell Night, Blair plays sorority pledge,Marti Gaines who, along with three other Alpha Sigma Rho pledges, takes part in an initiation.
She, along with rich kid Jeff (Peter Barton), gorgeous blonde Denise (Suki Goodwin), and surfer dude Seth (Vincent Van Patten), is prompted to spend the night in a haunted mansion called Garth Manor.
There's an entire caravan of giggling college girls, buff college guys, nerds, and lots of beer taking the new pledges to the house. During this time, Alpha Sigma Rho President, Peter, tells the ever-so-standard tale of how the home's former owner, Raymond Garth, killed his three deformed children and his wife. Garth also ended his own life by hanging. On top of that Shining-esque macabre story, Peter mentions that the youngest of the children, Andrew, was never found. Que the predictability!
So, finally the parade of dorks and other useless people arrive at the house. While the new pledges are settling in, their fellow students are outside rigging up scares and pranks to get them on edge and see how long they'll last.
Little do they know that Seth and Denise hopped into the sack pretty damn quick. And Marti and Jeff are...just getting acquainted. Everyone in the house is aware of the pranks and tricks, so they adjust to it fairly quickly.
All the while, one by one, those outside are getting slaughtered. Heads are getting chopped off. Girls are getting taken. Blood and guts are spilling! And the horror lurks inside as well. Denise gets her head cut off, too. It's hell!
Did I mention, to add to the disorientation going on outside, there's a hedge maze. Where have we seen that before?
We slowly began to see that the murderer is a towering, deformed man.
The pledges inside struggle all they can to get out of the house. And it all comes down to the one 

Linda Blair in Hell Night

pledge that's left.
The ending was suspenseful and played out really well.
Hell Night has its fun moments. It carries out the suspense nicely.
I mean, the audience knows what's going to happen. But when? And how? Let's see it! The intrigue certainly lasts.
It's such the archetypal horror movie. There's just no other way to put it.
One scene (among many) that make it the perfect image of a horror movie is when Seth makes it out of the house, runs to a police station, frantically tells the cops people are getting murdered, and then gets reprimanded by the police as they think he's playing a joke. "As useless as a cop in a horror movie" the old saying goes.
Seth's reaction is fantastic after he leaves the station. He steals a rifle from the police department (quite easily, I'll add), climbs through a window and hi-jacks a car. It's hilarious, though not meant to be.
Hell Night definitely has one thing going for it. It's entertaining, and that's the whole point of a movie like this to begin with.
Being that quintessential 80s horror flick does the trick. It may be predictable. It may be campy at times. But it's exactly the kind of movie to quench that Friday night thirst for a "bad, but good" popcorn movie.
Chuck Russell is the executive producer. He must have learned something during production because he later directed A Nightmare on Elm Street III; The Dream Warriors (1987) - the only best Elm Street sequel hands down!
Blair's rooftop chase in the movie (inspired by Jamie Lee Curtis's chase scene in Terror Train) was a splendid sequence definitely unworthy of the Razzie she won.
And despite its reputation of schlockiness, though still excellent as popcorn entertainment, Hell Night was a career move for Frank Darabont who served as production assistant. Darabont later directed The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist - all based on Stephen King stories.
He was also the executive producer for The Walking Dead season 1 and some of season 2. Oh, and like Chuck Russell, he worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 - Darabont was a screen writer. I could go further into that, but I don't want to digress.

Hell Night needs resurfacing as its been buried deep in the recesses of pop culture.