Owensboro has an old building that's been converted by it's latest owner into a haunted house attraction.  Everything seemed to be running smoothly until a group of young folks who were setting up the house for the current season suddenly had a chain of "accidents" that left all but one of them dead, and the one that was left alive...marked.  Now the owner, having seen the money potential behind the situation if the place is actually haunted and the ghost has started killing people, has called in a small group of five young paranormal investigators (strikingly similar to the Scooby Doo gang by the way, including a couple of idiot stoners, one of which was named Doobie) to investigate.  Now they, along with the owner and a few others are all locked in the building for the evening to investigate.  The question is, how many of them will make it back out of that building alive?

Hallows Eve: Slaughter on Second Street was written and directed by P.J. Starks and co-written by Rodney Newton.  Though they have worked together for years in production and editing, neither had ever made a film, and they decided it was high time they just went out and did it.  I love hearing stories like that, especially when the end result turned out to be something good.  In this case, it did.

I'm going to start off with the things that were done right with this film, many of which are surprising considering this was their first film.

I guess a good place to start with this would be the running time.  This was a feature length film, and in many cases, people who jump straight into features without cutting their teeth on shorts first would tend to screw it up, often times really badly.  In this case however, they did a good job with everything from the story and character development (with one exception about the story) as well as the editing, pacing and everything else.

Another thing that impressed me was the quality of the actors that were used.  They actually filled the cast with some pretty decent actors.  A lot of film makers on their first project often just get whoever they can to fill the cast whether they're any good or not.  Fortunately, P.J. and Rodney didn't fall into that trap, and instead filled the cast with people who not only could act, but also were suited the characters they were playing.  It's so important to spend real time on casting a film and to find people who are actually talented and can bring life and realism to their characters.  Poor casting choices can be the death of any film, no matter how good the story is.

Now, all that said, this film did have a few problems as well.  Let's start with the one problem with the story.

The building in this film is supposed to be haunted with a ghost killing everyone.  It turned out later however to be the caretaker that was killing everyone, and apparently he had a deal with the owner to do it.  Then at the end, there turned out to actually be a ghost that was killing people as well, as it started up again two years later, long after the caretaker had been killed by one of the paranormal investigators.  There were some holes in the story here that were never explained.  The deal between the owner and the caretaker, the real story of the ghost and the land the building was built on, which the caretaker seemed to know but never explained to anyone and last but not least, the fact that it's hard to tell whether all the murders were caused by the caretaker or if some were done by the ghost or even if some were just random accidents.  It seemed to be a combination of the three, but it's a bit unclear.

The only other real problem I had with this film is that it was often far too dark.  There was no reason for the building to be that dark, and it really hindered being able to see what was going on in many of the scenes, most especially the ones where people were being killed.  Now, darkness can be used to cover up the fact that the effects may not look as good as the film makers would have liked, but in this case the whole thing was just a little too dark.  It's possible to give the impression of darkness without it actually being too dark to make out what's going on in the scene, so hopefully that's something that can be looked at and worked with in their next film.

Technically, other than some lighting issues, the film was quite well done.  The camera shots were all set up nicely, the editing was tight and kept the story moving along quite nicely.  The sound as well was recorded at decent levels, which is another technical issue that many first time film makers seem to have.  They don't put the effort into recording good audio, and as a result, the dialogue is hard to hear and much of the story is lost as the viewer strains to hear what's going on.  That was not the case in this film.  The dialogue was for the most part all clearly recorded and quite audible.

Hallows Eve: Slaughter on Second Street is a surprisingly well made film for a first effort, everyone involved from the film makers to the cast should be proud of this film.  I heard that one of its first reviews was just nasty and like a kick in the balls for the film makers, which made them leary of sending it out for more reviews.  Fortunately, their nads are safe from my reviewing boot since I actually quite enjoyed this film.  If I'm being honest, I had flipped through it a bit to see what it was like when I first received it and it didn't look like much, but once I actually sat down and watched it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually a quite a good film, and I'd be happy to recommend it to anyone.  If you get a chance to see it, by all means do so.  It's definitely worth your time.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, you can check out the film's website at http://www.hallowsevemovie.com.