HOUSEBOAT HORROR (1989) BAD HALLOWEEN MOVIE

Halloween Month is nearly over, and Balladeer’s Blog is here with a review of what is often called the worst Australian horror film ever made.

HOUSEBOAT HORROR (1989) – “Mullets ahoy!” would make a good alternate title for this Shot on Video disaster from Down Under. Star Alan Dale of Neighbors fame leads a cast of untalented actors and barely adequate musicians who get chopped up by a disfigured slasher.

Ignore reviews which claim this flick is a Heavy Metal Horror Movie. Whatever the awful band in Houseboat Horror may be, they are definitely NOT Heavy Metal. If they were, I’d have covered this movie in my look at over Thirteen Heavy Metal Horrors from the 1980s. The band here is called a “disco group” multiple times, which made me wonder if Australians really still considered disco “cool” by 1989.

Taking things from the top, Houseboat Horror is set in Victoria, Australia at Lake Eildon going by the fictional name Lake Infinity. Alan Dale stars as director Grant Evans, who will be making a music video with a supposedly hot new Aussie band on a houseboat. 

Text onscreen tells us it is October, which in Australia should be Spring, but the Aussie filmmakers for some reason have the characters keep saying it’s Winter. Guess they forgot what month they claimed it was.

The destined slasher victims proceed in multiple vehicles to Lake Infinity to shoot their video. The car with the musicians and a couple of groupies in it actually shows sense enough not to pick up a creepy, oddly dressed hitchhiker who turns out to be the movie’s slasher, Acid Head.

They DO pick up a blonde airhead who is headed to the lake to meet up with her boyfriend, who is camping in that area. She has the band members drop her off about a mile before they reach their destination, where she finds her beau has already been killed by our slasher, who also kills her – or what looks like a different actress playing her. Yes, the movie’s THAT bad.   

And no, I don’t know how he got there at the same time as the blonde hitchhiker since she was picked up by a car that declined to pick him up and left him far behind.

Next, the band and the film crew for the music video arrive at a site where people can rent houseboats for a few days or weeks on the lake. The townies are the stereotypical ugly, hostile types who don’t cotton to either loud musical bands OR “film people.”

The dour anti-reception committee includes an uptight forest ranger who tells the large music video bunch about a film crew who showed up years earlier and wound up getting killed by a fire. Or maybe it was the scarred survivor of the fire, who was a younger brother of one of the crew’s actresses. 

The uptight forest ranger turns out to be a red herring, since our real slasher soon hacks him to death with a very long knife.

At the houseboat, the musicians and the director and their babes get to sleep on board overnight, while the film crew sleep in tents on the shore. Houseboat Horror‘s formula is now revealed, as Acid Head kills off at least one of the cast members in horribly filmed scenes which make it almost impossible to determine who or how many folks he murdered.   

Come morning, anyone missing from being killed overnight is assumed to just be irresponsible jerks goofing off. The rest of the day is spent filming the video for the godawful song our band is promoting. More people get killed off but good luck remembering who anyone is outside of Alan Dale.

The crazed older sister of the disfigured Acid Head shows up to creep out our cast members and as another night falls, we get several more barely visible scenes of killings among the barely distinguishable actors and actresses. Some kills are memorable, like a horseshoe through both a woman’s eyes at once, a man’s head chopped in half and the spearing of an idiot riding a jet-ski at night.   

At last, we’re down to just four potential victims left alive as Acid Head stalks them on the houseboat. There’s much more cinematic ineptitude, but sadly very little of it is bad in a funny way and is mostly just boring.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Ultimately, we’re down to our Final Girl who slays the slasher and to three characters we thought were killed but who have survived only to fall victim to our disfigured slasher’s crazy older sister.

And, needless to say for a 1980s slasher flick, Acid Head himself turns out to have survived, setting up a sequel which thankfully never got made.  

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