Loud teens head out to the local abandoned house of ill legend for a Halloween party. Well, the legends are all true, and that's the one night of the year when Hell's gates are flung open wide, and fooling with seances and stuff is just asking for night of the demons.

I really wanted to like this. They even had me at the fantastic animated opening credits. Excitement began turning to alarm after a half hour spent with these fairly unpleasant characters doing pretty much nothing, but I stubbornly hung in there. I had to like this; I had almost already decided to buy it even. Surely renting it first to make sure was just a formality before it joined my all-80s team.

It reminded me of when I was a brat and begged for this football uniform for christmas, thinking it would be the best thing ever, and when I got it I put it on and the world didn't change. Apparently I hadn't considered the fact that I didn't even know any kids to play football with. My beady little mind couldn't accept the disillusionment of realising it was kind of lame and I'd blown my whole christmas, so I strained with all my might to pretend it was somehow fun to wear it while I kicked a football at a tree or something.

So I'm trying hard to like this movie, telling myself "naw it's still good, Linnea hasn't started being freaky yet and it'll be okay as soon as that loudmouth fat guy's dead", and hopes of impending awesomeness peaked for a minute when that one girl started acting spooky and did a pretty amazing goth chick dance number. At first when she's dancing with no music it's just mesmerising. But after that the movie settled right back into not very likeable people interacting and pretty soon my eye couldn't help wandering to the 'ol clock and I was getting cold wearing football shorts outside in December, and then it was over.

Wait not quite - that old guy swallows a bunch of razor blades. That was okay.

So what went wrong? Is it me? Shouldn't I love this? I mean it's packed with classic 80s stuff like a great synth score and Linnea Quigley backside (and frontside), and people talk about this movie in the same breath with Night of the Creeps and Fright Night and other iconic 80s horror. And yet, I find myself not too bothered. I feel like the movie just hardly does anything. I remember lots of that girl saying the house is possessed, followed by the movie's small army of young jackass males taking turns obnoxiously proclaiming such to be bullshit and shut up bitch. We're nearly an hour into this before anyone so much as gets bit by a demon, and aside from a couple okay kills they mostly just go "RAAAR!" and threaten people in a Fat Albert voice. Ms Quigley does of course do something freaky, but even there, well it was okay but I'm a Trash from Return of the Living Dead guy myself.

Really is it me? Maybe I need to see it again or something. Maybe I had liked the movie too much before I ever saw it. Maybe you have to think it's going to be horrible in order to like it.
I just...too many of those guys. The main reason I love 80s movies is I usually don't detest the kids in them so much, but today I kind of did and that just poisons a movie for me.

It definitely does have the nostalgia thing going though. It took me right back to the 80s. Sometimes the 80s were dull and kind of irritating, but it certainly took me back. I seem to be the only one who doesn't like this though so you should probably watch it as part of the standard canon. You really do want to see that dance number.

And parents, I know it's going to seem absurd and possibly insulting to get advice from this quarter on how to raise a brat, but seriously if you get your kid some big dubious toy like a Dukes of Hazzard slip 'n slide, always get 'em a bag of army men too.