The Barn review
The Barn is a throwback to 1980s horror that gets a decent amount right. It captures the Halloween season better than most…but is held back by too many slow parts. A sequel (The Barn Part II) is also available on Screambox.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
The Barn
Directed by Justin M. Seaman
Written by Justin M. Seaman
Starring Mitchell Musolino, Will Stout, Lexi Dripps, Cortland Woodard, Nikki Howell and Linnea Quigley
The Barn Review
There’s no shortage of modern slasher movies that set themselves in the glory days of the subgenre. The recently released The Third Saturday in October Part V and its original chapter follow up choose opposite ends of the spectrum (1995 and 1979 respectively). They aren’t picked without forethought. 1979 represents an immediate post-Halloween period where slashers were about to boom. 1995 is the year before Scream pushed slashers into a post-modern era.
The Barn chooses 1989. It’s not the most interesting year, to be sure. Slashers were in serious decline as the 80s drew to a close. One need look no further than the big three franchises. All three were hitting new lows. Freddy was meeting the Dream Child. Jason was taking Manhattan. Michael Myers was…honestly, I don’t know what the hell was going on in The Revenge of Michael Myers. I do know that all three were sloppy versions of once successful franchises.
It’s a bit of a safety valve…setting your slasher movie at a time where slasher movies were out of fashion. If you are meant to be compared with notoriously bad movies…you give yourself a better chance of success. The Barn does a decent job capturing a low budget slasher from 1989. It does a better job capturing the feeling of the Halloween season.
The Halloween setting gives The Barn atmosphere and a sense of fun. I generally find most movies set on the holiday to be derivative or ring hollow. This one gets it right. The parties, the trick or treating, the costumes…everything feels right and evokes the sense that the world of The Barn is a town in the fall of 1989. It also allows the masked demons to wander about undetected.
The Halloween setting is the biggest ace that The Barn has up its sleeve. Writer/director Justin M. Season’s obvious passion for the genre is the second biggest. He crafts a fun story full of gore and atmosphere. A lot of love went into this…and you can see it on screen. Certain budgetary trappings are unavoidable…but it overcomes more than most.
The story begins with a flashback to 1959. We are introduced to the three masked demons that will plague the town of Wheary Falls throughout the movie. Legend has it that the demons (a miner, a scarecrow and a pumpkinhead) come from a cursed barn. The movie wastes no time getting down to business. The demons kill a particularly annoying kid before we’ve even settled into our seats. The Barn isn’t messing around.
Flash forward to 1989…and there’s an appropriately named Demon Inferno concert planned in that very spot on Halloween night. What follows is a late 80s slasher, as promised. That means the characters aren’t all that memorable as they’re chased by the great costumed killers. It also means that there are more than a few slow spots. That part, perhaps, is less indicative of the era and more the seams of a low budget feature showing.
The biggest flaw in The Barn is the incredibly bad ADR. It’s so noticeable that it takes you out of any already monotonous dialog scenes. It sounds like a dub of a foreign language film. Like people are reading the script in a soundproof room and not living at all in the moment. Thankfully, the parts of the movie that involve murder are fun. And that’s what we’re here for anyway.
The truth is…if you are looking for a slasher movie from 1989…you could do worse than The Barn. People did worse than The Barn. For all its flaws it has something the previously mentioned slasher movies lacked. Passion. Halloween 5, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and Friday the 13th Part VIII were made by studios looking for continued profits. We may still love those movies…and that’s fine. The Barn loves them too.
Scare Value
The Barn is a find effort. Clearly made with a passion for the period it attempts to evoke…it mostly feels just like it should. More importantly, it feels like a movie to watch on Halloween. Most movies that attempt to fit that niche come off feeling forced. The Barn feels right. It would just feel better with more even pacing.
2.5/5
The Barn Links
Streaming on Screambox
Rent/Buy on VOD from VUDU and Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
