Classic Halloween aesthetics—think plastic skeletons and sheet ghosts—have a nostalgic appeal that can read as either kitschy or chilling, depending on the context. “Hallowarrior” understands the power of this iconography, pairing the childlike and innocent with the dark and morbid for a skin-crawling effect that’s extremely appropriate for the season. Unfortunately, the execution sucks much of the whimsy out of what could have been a fun autumnal horror romp.
Director Ben Sottack seems to draw primary inspiration from Rob Zombie, whose “House of 1000 Corpses” is also set on Halloween night. Like Zombie, Sottack takes traditional Halloween imagery and dirties it up by pairing it with a gritty, violent home-invasion narrative. It’s a bit like trick-or-treating in reverse: Rather than going out into the night in search of candy, Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro) sends out a message from her CB radio, calling for anyone who hears her to come to her house and share the gigantic stockpile of sweets she’s been building up for the past four years.
Pumpkin’s mom would have told her not to eat so much candy, but she died a while ago, along with the rest of Pumpkin’s family when a strange new illness started ravaging their town. All the crops died, too, so now the only food left is ultra-processed stuff like the buckets of lollipops and chocolate bars Pumpkin keeps stashed around her living room. The world seems to have ended sometime in the mid-’80s, based on the technology that Pumpkin uses to watch old home videos alongside the corpses of her parents and brother; these sit draped in sheets with Halloween masks fastened over their sunken faces, one of the more macabre and effective touches in writer-director Sottack’s post-apocalyptic horror film.
“Hallowarrior” works better as an idea than as a story, however, as Sottack’s script overstates its characters’ motivations and telegraphs their actions early on. In short, a marauding gang of ne’er-do-wells led by Thalia (Shannyn Sossamon) and Royce (A.J. Bowen) responds to Pumpkin’s call for Halloween companionship, taking advantage of the girl’s loneliness and lack of firearms skill to take over her family’s home. Adjani Russell co-stars as the group’s reluctant newest member, Wendy, who shows up with a burlap bag over her head like Batman’s nemesis Scarecrow but soon rips it off to reveal a smear of black across her eyes and a bad attitude.
The Bat-verse parallels continue when Thalia ambushes Pumpkin and injects her with some kind of hallucinogenic drug that transports her to an off-brand version of The Further from “Insidious,” but with the contrast turned way up so that the oranges really pop. Shapiro, best known for her brief, shocking role in Ari Aster’s “Hereditary,” is a more skilled actor than this kind of movie really calls for, and it’s a credit to her talent that her character’s sadness and naiveté still translate even in these heightened surroundings. But the script doesn’t do her any favors, forcing her to deliver entire scenes of unnatural-sounding expository dialogue while her co-stars sit and wait for her to finish talking.
Normally, the gore scenes take over here. But while Sottack and his crew deserve credit for using practical makeup effects to execute “Hallowarrior’s” gunshot wounds, chemical burns, and frenzied disembowlings, the prosthetics hold up for only a few seconds of screen time. They’re too crudely executed to give this movie the nasty edge it so clearly craves, and the bizarre, “Hellraiser”-esque freaks Thalia invites to Pumpkin’s house party late in the film play too minor a role to really turn things around.
That leaves the viewer with little but autumnal vibes to sustain “Hallowarrior’s” brief 80-minute runtime. To be fair, they are on point, with “Night of the Living Dead”-style zombie arms breaking through boarded-up windows and a chase through a cornfield lit only by flashlights, alongside your typical bats and pumpkins. Shapiro even has a perfectly coiffed bright-orange mullet, which one assumes would be extremely difficult to sustain in a post-apocalyptic world without running water, let alone hair salons. But it looks cool. And that’s not nothing, particularly when you’re watching a movie on the couch with a bucket of candy beside you and a spiked apple cider in hand.
