This was the second Joe Bob special thing that I watched with Jess, and uh, hoo boy. It’s not good — like, it’s really, really bad in almost every dimension — but like… there are movies that are bad in just bland and uninteresting ways. This one was bad in interesting ways.

So it’s a 1988 direct-to-video movie that has nothing to do with pumpkins at all, made by an Indian director who apparently didn’t speak English well enough to even talk to his cast, which still can’t explain the weirdness of the performances, which include a cult-leader grandpa who talks like a Southern sheriff drag queen in every scene.

The movie includes a whole bunch of nudity because (according to Joe Bob) the director was told that was key to its success in the international direct-to-video market, but it’s really weirdly filmed nudity, like someone was trying to explain to a robot what “sexy” looks like, and the explanation wasn’t quite getting through. At one point there’s a stripper at a Halloween party, presented as a totally normal thing that of course all Halloween parties have (there was also a lady dancing with a snake, and a stand-up comic who was just telling jokes in the crowd in what felt for all the world like one of those cringey Mrs. Maisel sections where she fails to read a room and launches into her routine in the middle of someone else’s thing).

At one point in the movie, a character falls asleep and has a dream that is literally just a music video, and it’s like… were they trying to get a single from this movie to chart, and wanted to be ready with the video? That can’t possibly make sense, and yet nothing else makes any sense either.

The dialogue is hilariously bad, the characters are hilariously misconceived, the plot is absurd, situations that are treated seriously are triple-absurd (who among us hasn’t had sex on a freshly-filled grave with a corpse hand sticking up from the earth? … oh, none of you? haha me neither haha ok), but it’s all got that earnest weirdness that you can only get from people who genuinely have no idea what they’re doing but are trying their best.

Basically, this is like a perfect MST3K/RiffTrax movie, and it’d be better to watch it with the jokes on top, but also it’s ridiculous enough that you don’t strictly speaking need the jokes to laugh at it. I can’t actually recommend it, but if it’s 1AM and you’re not sober and want something stupid to laugh at, well, here you are.