I've not mentioned the annoying purple werewolf prowling around the woods all this time because I think you should experience that one for yourself. I'll just mention he likes to hold doors shut as the party people try to escape their soon-to-be rooms of doom in the mansion, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. It is pretty funny to watch, though, so I wanted to give you a head's up on it.
As horror movie luck would have it, the Sal Mineo look-alike of the bunch insists on breaking into a padlocked closet to find a corpse clutching a Ouija board. Carly, the quiet but Ouija-savvy girl of the bunch, knows exactly what to do with the planchette. They bicker as Carly asks questions like "will we get out alive," and we cut to the sorcerer playing a game of chess, although he never seems to move any pieces. Apparently he needs the souls of people to revive his wife, who poisoned herself to get away from him. Ah ha! The plot starts peeking through. Enjoy it while it lasts because a peek is all you get.
Carly becomes possessed by the sorcerer and starts to go after the others. As they hustle out the front door, zombies crash the pajama party by popping up out of the graveyard. Naturally, everyone hustles back into the mansion while screaming hysterically. Then they start bickering some more and decide to split up. Zombies outside, a demon-possessed fiend on the inside, and they decide to split up. They actually take time to discuss the matter, too. Here's where you notice that the acting in no way attempts to mirror the adrenalin-rush terror befalling them. The three directors — yes, I said three — must have been on a coffee break during these scenes.
With the directors not around, the makeup and special effects crew indulges their fancies. The 1980s was the decade of puffy rubbery monster suits, herky-jerky animatronics, skittery stop-motion, and greenish-purplish makeup with fangs. You see all of it in this film to varying degrees of success.
One by one, our blundering bunch of bickering idiots gets taken out by one monstrosity after another. Interspersed between each tableau of gory doom, the sorcerer gloats, speaks in a Lugosi-styled accent that's as bad as his makeup, and summons forth more creatures of the night through Carly. And each time someone scrambles to get out of a room, we cut to the purple werewolf holding the door closed so they can't open it.
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