Mr. Halloween is a low-budget supernatural horror movie with lots of blood and gore, mixed up with a little weird humor, that takes place in a real live small town in upstate NY, known as Sauquoit. The basic premise is that large numbers of teenagers from this town have been mysteriously disappearing for quite some time and the local constabulary can't seem to do anything about it.
The chief bad guy, and title character, is a local recluse named Bill Loomis (creepily played by Bill Loomis), who is obsessed with Halloween and who also happens to have died a long time ago, which is a fact that seems to have completely escaped his incredibly obtuse neighbors. Every Halloween Mr. Loomis puts on a haunted house festival in his dilapidated two-story garage for the amusement of the locals, complete with ghosts and mummies and monsters and people getting their heads chopped off by guillotines and so on. What his neighbors don't know, besides the fact that Mr. Loomis is an animated corpse, is that he uses real body parts to create his haunted house monsters, acquiring them from the teenagers he kidnaps and keeps prisoner in his basement until he needs a new body part or two for his creations.
The local sheriff seems to be, besides a total jerk, completely clueless as to what is happening to the kids. For some odd reason he manages to keep his job, despite the fact that about 27-bazillion local kids have mysteriously disappeared during the last year or two, and also despite the fact that he doesn't seem to be at all interested in finding out what's going on.
Meanwhile, some of the local kids, being much less obtuse than their parents, have gotten suspicious of Mr. Loomis and have decided to conduct a little investigation of their own, which of course, this being a horror film, might not be good for them.
Also, and again meanwhile, the deputy sheriff, who is, unlike his boss, not a total jerk, and who is also the brother of one of the kidnaped kids, conducts his own investigation, which might not be good for him, either.
So, is the sheriff completely clueless, or is he something else? What's going to happen to the current batch of kidnaped kids? Will they live or die? What's going to happen to the deputy? Will he live or die? Why is a dead guy able to remain on the local tax rolls, despite his deadness, and how does he manage to keep on killing people without any of the locals catching on? And how many ways can this dead guy make other people dead, and which body part or parts will he remove next?
For the answers to these important questions, and others, watch the darned flick. It's a hoot, and a good example of a funky and gory, low-budget horror movie that shouldn't be missed by anyone who likes funky and gory, low-budget horror movies. And don't forget the popcorn. Mr. Halloween would be disappointed if you did.
* * *
By the way, despite this being a low-budget movie made by people who've never made a movie before, there's a lot of really good camera shots and angles in it, along with an interesting story, and Bill Loomis is amazingly effective at playing a creepy, dead guy kidnapper and killer.
* * *
And just a little note about the jacket of this DVD: this movie has absolutely nothing to do with killer clowns. People who like killer clown movies will be disappointed if they rent this one because it's not about killer clowns, and people who don't like killer clown movies won't rent it because the jacket makes it look like it's about killer clowns. I'm puzzled, but maybe I'm just an easily puzzled guy.
