Monday, October 12, 2015

Jack-O (1995)

Little Sean Kelly has dreams about his ancestors and a crazy killer pumpkin man.  It turns out this is due to a curse on the family which plays out on the fifth generation.  And that poor cursed sucker is Sean.

When some drunken frat boys party in the graveyard, they set loose Jack-O to take his revenge.  Jack-O turns out to have a large pumpkin head and a scythe, but an unimpressive physique. So if you saw him, you'd be half scared and half thinking he's not strong enough to wield his deadly weapon.

Jack-O is on the look out for Sean, but he'll kill anyone who happens to get in his way, or is in the wrong place at the wrong time.    Since it's Halloween, people aren't that alarmed by a huge pumpkin headed loon.

Sean's family has a haunted house in their garage. They use it to make money for the homeless.  I've never heard of someone charging to enter a homemade, garage based haunt, but okay.  No one notices the huge freak with the pumpkin head even though he didn't pay to get in.

Linnea Quigley stars as Sean's babysitter.  The kid who plays Sean is the directors son.  Sean always has the same ho-hum look on face, and is never really expressive.

The movie has scenes with Cameron Mitchell and John Carradine, who had both already passed away by the time the movie was made.  In a blog post, director Steve Latshaw stated, "Carradine had died in Spain, back in 1988. Mr. Mitchell had passed away in the summer of 1994, just a few months earlier. But both men had been close friends of Fred Ray and Fred would periodically bring them into the studio and pay them a tidy sum to shoot some isolated scenes."  So this explains all the movies that these two show up in spouting insane or inane dialogue.  Smart way to sell a low budget film though.


If you're looking for a Halloween film you haven't seen, this will fit the bill. But you're looking for a good or scary movie then you'll want to pass.  It's your typical 90s generic Halloween film. If you want to know more about the movie, you can read the entire blog post by Steve Latshaw about the making of Jack-O

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