Movie Review: ‘WNUF HALLOWEEN SPECIAL’

For horror fans, there seems to be a pattern in our exploration of cinema as well as testing our limits. Your typical horror fan will go through the mainstream or well known classics. Once you get past those, you start to get into the obscure films as well as the independent films. If you decide to dive deeper, you will dig up real-life video death compilations. At this point of time, you may even start to find yourself looking for tapes to test your limits and sometimes, it has to come from reality.

A tape has popped up and has been talked about online called the WNUF Halloween Special. The tape documents a lost late 80’s broadcast that took place on Halloween night. Broadcaster Frank Stewart is our host for a tour into the supposedly haunted Webber House. Armed with a camera crew and a spousal paranormal investigative team. What followed was something that has been questioned by many video and supernatural enthusiasts.

Of course, none of what I just said in the previous paragraph is real. The WNUF Halloween Special is a fictional film, no matter how convincing it is, cooked up by writer/director Chris LaMartina and writers Jimmy George and Pat Storck. You wouldn’t really know this unless you dug around the internet as there are no credits to the film (or at least the screener that was sent to me). One of my major gripes about found footage films, which I think we can claim this as an entry in the genre, is technical inaccuracies. For me, that kind of stuff pulls me out of any story you are trying to pass off as real. The creative team behind WNUF Halloween Special seems like those specific details bug them as well because they have created something that really feels like it was typed off of 1980’s television. You get 20 minutes of a news broadcast and the paranormal investigation in addition to television commercials. Everything feels genuine and the fact that these small details have been handled to precision really make anyone who watches this believe that this is for real. As someone who was born in the early 80’s, I couldn’t help myself from smiling and getting giddy of not only the way this film is amazingly executed but with all the references film. From shot-on-video director names being referenced to a commercial of a film called Armed to Strike, a mash up of Paul Schrader scribed films Rolling Thunder and Taxi Driver, WNUF Halloween Special has a lot in store for 25 to 30 year old horror fans. The aesthetic presentation of the film will make you reminisce old Halloween television broadcasts.

The tape fast-forwards through some of the commercials, varying through Drug and Suicide PSAs to 1-900 Orders of Hair Rock Compilations (I have included some screenshots of these in this review), and through the weather section of the news broadcast yet leaves some commercials intact during the sections of the investigation where things get heated up. This is where people may have issues with the film as the filmmakers seem proud, and they should be, of how accurate they executed the commercials that they want you to see what every last second. Sadly, this weighs down the actual story being told. When the story starts to get suspenseful, those pesky commercials get in the way of our feelings. However, there is no doubt in my head that if this actually happened, it would happen like this. Theoretically though, the critic inside of me tells me we are not watching a tape where we are a controller, we are watching the tape through the eyes of a controller. This conflicts the claim that the film folds out how it did on TV, thereby displacing its own logic that it has built. And while I wish the actual story was a bit more scary or fleshed out, the horror fiend in me finds a lot to love about the film.

Full of heart and tribute, WNUF Halloween Special is a real gem of independent filmmaking. 25-30 year old horror fans that remember these types of broadcasts are going to eat this film up and I think generally be pleased. I really cannot wait to see what the creative team behind the film comes up with as I believe that we could see some truly great things. Kudos to the filmmakers and I highly recommend a watch, if not by October 31st this year, give it a spin next October.

You can order the VHS here

The DVD will be available on October 22, 2013. Order it Now