Linda Blair, everybody's favorite head-tolling girl, stars as an extremely cute college girl named Marti. Together with 3 other students, she's locked overnight in a haunted mansion as some sort of fraternity initiation rite. The house used to be inhabited by a family of weirdoes (figures…) and the deformed son is believed to still dwell around in the tunnels underneath the mansion's basement. While the other fraternity members are playing pranks to increase the eeriness, the real killer comes to interfere…

Of course, you can't really refer to this 'Hell Night' as being a good film. It's an 80's slasher, produced in-between two 'Halloween'-films. The only reason of this film's existence is to raise more money, so you can't be too demanding for plots, logic or credibility. In it's own specific category, this is a more than decent film. I can name you over a thousand similar films that are worse but only a few that are better. It's amazing what a competent director (Tom DeSimone – specialized in 'Women Behind Bars'-flicks) and a devoted cast (Linda Blair!!) can achieve. There are quite a few suspenseful sequences in Hell Night and the gore is not exploited for once. The settings are decent but sometimes underexposed, which is a bit of a shame. Overall, this a lot more tolerable than the average flick in which teens are slaughtered by the dozen.

Four fraternity pledges are told off to stay at a deserted house where a series of horrendous murders happened years ago.

It's a slasher flick, and it seems to be done all right, even if it takes a reel or two before anything happens. That might be all right if they used it for character building or something, but no, it's intended to make the arc of overacting more extreme. Some people can get away with this. The late Diana Wynne Jones was expert at this, writing her YA fantasy novels in which nothing seemed to happen for the first 140 pages..... only you realized as you rounded the corner into the final 20 how it all fit together like clockwork.

So it's up to the performers to carry this movie, and they are a competent bunch, with Linda Blair at the trough of her career, and one of the innumerable Van Patten clans -- in this case, Peter -- being the final two standing. You know only one of them will stagger away, but by the time the point was settled, I didn't care.

It's Frank Darabont's first screen credit. He was a PA on this one.

HELL NIGHT is a run-of-the-mill slasher flick from the early 1980s, notable only for the casting of THE EXORCIST's Linda Blair as a college student who decides to spend the night in a haunted mansion along with some of her equally unaware companions. Of course, what starts out as a night of fun and hijinks soon turns into something a lot darker.

To be frank, HELL NIGHT has little to make it stand out with other slashers from the era, except that it focuses more on building the usual creepy stalk-and-slash atmosphere rather than providing more gruesome thrills (the bloodshed is limited this time around). The characters are the usual archetypes, and nobody can go into this expecting Blair to deliver a good performance; she's here to show off her cleavage, and that's about it.

The eventual unmasking of the villains makes for an effective spook-show scare, however, and I admit to liking the last half hour or so, where things really start to kick off with some great chase material. The presence of British actress Suki Goodwin in the cast was a nice surprise for me, even if the male actors deliver completely undistinguished performances. In the end, HELL NIGHT is one of those ghost train rides captured on film; good fun at the time but completely forgettable afterwards.