WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Absolutely the worst movie.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Some background. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a treasure trove of 80s and 90s commercials on YouTube. I watched them on and off for a days. I also started watching episodes of Unsolved Mysteries.A few days later I'm going through movies on my Shudder subscription and I see this thing called the WNUF Halloween special.I check it out, and it turns out... this movie is my JAM!Now, as a kid I remember watching Halloween specials every year. What this did was perfectly recreate the specials. To top that off they did old commercials, and they did them fantastically well. The old commercials were like real old commercials. This is just a great recreation.It's one of those times where you stumble upon something that is exactly like something you want to watch. I'm looking forward to more work by the makers of this.

I think I can count on one hand the movies that I have given a one star rating to on this site, but if I could go lower for this pile of tripe, I would. Who in their right mind is giving this 9 stars in their reviews? Are you serious? I know that we all have our personal tastes, but ratings like that are the reason no one takes this site seriously. Are you trying to tell me this movie is in the top tier of horror movies ever released? Really?This is marketed well. The movie creators wanted it to feel like an actual news broadcast gone wrong, caught on some lost and obscure VHS tape and found for our startling shock years later. On paper, it's a fantastic idea and the movie tries hard to recreate that feel, but goes waaaaaaay too far trying to accomplish it.We start out with a half hour news broadcast. I'm not joking, either. You literally watch a half hour news broadcast, complete with bad anchors making corny jokes. Naturally, being Halloween night, most of the stories revolve around the holiday, but it starts losing the audience right away.Eventually, we get to a special investigation with a reporter visiting a haunted house, accompanied by a priest and a couple of paranormal investigators. Things go awry as the evening wears on and leaves the viewer wondering if the terror is real or supernatural.Let's get one thing out of the way. This is ultra low budget, featuring actors you'll never see again, virtually non-existent effects and horrible dialog. No part of my bashing of this movie has anything to do with those limitations. I love indie horror. I support indie horror. I accept and, almost, embrace these things about indie horror. That's not my problem with the movie.First, let's rant about the news broadcast again. It's almost a full third of the movie. So, before we get to any plot that is essential for further into the movie, the audience is already getting bored with the tedious ploy of this fake news cast. Yes, I'll spoil things by saying that part of this news has a bearing on events to come, but half an hour is just not necessary.What's with the fast forwarding? You just ruined the idea, idiots. Is that supposed to be clever? I need another way to bash me over the head with the fact that it's a VHS tape? If you are going for an immersive experience where a viewer might, conceivably, believe they were watching a real broadcast, why fast forward parts? It takes you out of the "experience" and reminds you that it's a joke.The actual "horror" is non-existent. By the time the movie gets done making corny jokes, we realize that almost nothing has actually happened. We are, then, asked to believe that these characters feel some terror, though nothing has really elicited that reaction, then a "wham bam" ending and it's done. They could have used this format to build real tension and create a real audience nightmare if we "thought" real terror was happening to real people on a real video, but they never even try.Now, let's get to the ultimate sin, the freaking commercials!!!! Since this is a "real broadcast" we have commercials. At first, they are amusing attempts at recreating lost era local TV commercials, but they just keep popping up over and over and over and over. There are as many commercials in the 90 minute movie as you would expect to get in a real 90 minute TV broadcast. The problem is that I watched a movie so I didn't have to deal with freaking commercials. By the end, it was everything I could do not to just stop the movie and give up. I wanted to grab whoever made this decision by the throat and throttle them.If they were silly, SNL style goofs, I could tolerate some of them. If there were more hayride, monster makeup, trick or treat feeling commercials, I would have taken more. Half these commercials are bad political commercials, or fake insurance ads, etc, that offer no humor and nothing more than 30 boring seconds of monotony. The whole gimmick might have worked if there was a commercial here or there, but I would honestly guess that a third of this run time is fake commercials. In college, I roomed with film students. Most made movies as good or better than this, albeit without the horrible commercials. This is not good. It's almost painful to watch. My wife exclaimed "Thank god that's over" when we finally got to the end. I couldn't have put it better myself.

"WNUF Halloween Special" is one of the many "found footage" movies that have cropped up in the last decade. "Supposedly" this special was aired in the late 80's on a local UHF station. Afterwards, all known copies were destroyed and the event was forgotten about, until now (Blah blah blah, you know the gist of these things) Basically a news reporter, a paranormal investigator husband and wife team (along with their cat) and a priest, seek to unravel the rumored haunting of a local house where a son killed his parents after being told to do so by ghosts that he communicated with via a Ouija board.Surprisingly the film is very authentic, looking exactly like a 3rd or 4th generation VHS tape, complete with "modern for the time" commercials with varying degrees of cheese. And while not too terribly frightening (to me at least), it does build atmosphere, which a lot of "found footage" films are sorely lacking.Definitely worth a viewing

It saddens me I am the first person to write about this movie. I guess I'm not really too sure how I even found out about it. Unfortunately for me, this is not a movie you want to have even heard of before experiencing it. It's available on VHS or DVD, get it on VHS if you have a working VHS player, as getting this on DVD is kinda pointless.I told my wife I found an old VHS tape someone had recorded in the 80's and made copies of, and we were gonna watch it for Halloween. This movie by far is the most believable 'found footage' movie I've ever seen. There were times I thought it was an actual recording from the 80's, and I knew about the movie. The VHS quality, the terrible commercials, the bad acting, and there are no credits to be found in the movie. The entire movie she kept asking me, is it real or is this one of those Blair Witch movies? I played dumb, and said I don't know, I found it online.The movie itself isn't anything spectacular, I rate it so high mostly for the fact there is no other 'found footage' movie this believable. It will be a hard movie to ever become a 'cult' movie just for the fact that once you know its's a movie; it definitely ruins the experience somewhat. My plan is to hang on to this treasure till I have kids, and tell them my parents recorded this in the 80's from TV on a VCR tape (kids won't even know what VHS tapes are then). This movie will for sure be in my Halloween viewing collection every year, and I hope to get more people to see it, as it's virtually unknown. The movie was made dirt cheap as well, and is an inspiration for people interested in making movies; as it shows a clever gimmick can go a long way.