Things start off with that hot n’ heavy jogging action so popular with the youth of today before dovetailing into a naked sacrifice to a monster… so begins Kenneth J. Hall’s horror-comedy/creature-feature/softcore sex flick, The Halfway House!
So about that jogger… well, she’s the sister of one Larissa Morgan (Janet Tracy Keijser) and she isn’t the type to take a missing sister lying down… unless she’s busy fucking a detective, one Dick Sheen (Shawn Savage) by name, to convince her to help her find her missing sib.
Said investigation leads to our heroine going undercover at the local church-run halfway house for wayward “girls” lorded over by the stern Sister Cecilia (genre legend Mary Woronov of Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 fame… and about a billion others), who by day keeps the ladies in line through a healthy dose of fear, and by night sacrifices anyone that tries to escape the house’s wicked walls to the tooth and tentacle heavy abomination that lives under that dread dwelling!
Can Larissa survive the machinations of Cecilia and her ravenous dark lord?
Imagine if Full Moon made a Skinemax flick based on a fever dream experienced by H.P. Lovecraft as transcribed by Glenn Danzig… that shit is The Halfway House through and through… plus comedy. Given that Kenneth J. Hall co-wrote the story for 1989’s Charles Band classic Puppet Master that Full Moon thing was probably inevitable…
Over the course of an hour and twenty-four minutes we get hilariously blasphemous humor, and absolute ass load of naked flesh, softcore lesbian trysts, and a big-ass fucking monster. If you don’t read those words and think “That sounds like a great recipe for a fun time in front of “ye olde boob (literally in this case) tube!” then your eerie eyeballs are scanning the wrong fucking column cats n’ creeps! And about that monster, what a wonder of rock-solid practical effects he is, created in part by the director’s brother; the late, great Cleve Hall, the Monster Man himself (who also plays the odious evil janitor Lutkus in the film), as well as the director himself.
Helping all of this delirious madness come together is an incredibly game cast, a fun basement temple set, and some rockin’ (now retro) tunes!
As for bonus features on this Blu-ray release from Intervision/Severin, we get a brand-spankin’ new retrospective featuring interviews with cast and crew, an amazingly honest and at times heart breaking tribute to Cleve Hall, an archival “making of” featurette, a music video, and trailers.
Boobs, blood, and beasts; The Halfway House delivers exactly what it promises (and then some), and provides plenty of fearsome fun for those that like to have their funny bone tickled while satisfying their horror hound appetites!
