Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Ghosts

This film’s director and writer, Walt Hefner, got out of the Air Force and went right into working at Spokane, Washington’s State Theater. He worked hard and eventually owned his own theaters and in 1972, opened the Starlite Drive-In. According to this article from the Inlander, Hefner showed some pretty great triple features, such as  I Spit on Your Grave, I Dismember Mama and Snuff all in one night in 1976.

In 1991, Hefner sold his drive-in to a theater chain and used the money to make this movie, produced and filmed in Spokane with an all-local crew. Where did this debut? The Newport Cinemas, built over the drive-in that Hefner once owned, four years after it was filmed.

Ralph (Charlie Shores), Amy (Pamela Kingsley), Jeanie (Jennifer Salmi) and Steve Jessup (Jason Jackson) are stuck. He can’t find a job and is angry that he has to live with his father and have his wife make the money. Then Amy learns that their church needs a caretaker, which gives Ralph something to do other than have flashbacks to Vietnam.

Then he hits Dan Marcum (Bill Hutton) with his van.

Marcum just escaped a mental hospital after years of care. He’d killed his family in that same church where the Jessups now live and his spirit won’t leave Dan alone.

So yes, this sounds like it’s inspired by every 80s haunted house movie — The Shining with the axe and caretaker parts — but what Hefner made is so strange that it begs to be seen. Ralph and Amy seem ready to murder one another at any moment, while Jeanie hurt her legs in an accident that her mother forces her to get past and when she finally gets over it and prepares to go on a date, the ghost of Marcum chains her legs and forcibly spreads them apart. This is a clothed scene but feels like such a violation and her trauma is not ignored. It all happens while one of those strange monkey with cymbal toys goes nuts. It’s terrifying.

Steve seems codependent on his dad. At times, they seem like the only two people who care about each other and then Ralph is abusing him. This all ends with Steve trapped in his room as a low budget version of Gozer mauls him and Ralph can’t figure out how to break the glass window into his son’s room. Who has a glass door for their bedroom? And who lit this scene, because the fog and pink light inside that haunted place is great!

Speaking of family issues, three years after this was made, Jennifer Salmi’s father Albert — the actor who appeared in Caddyshack, Superstition and Empire of the Ants — was served with divorce and restraining order from his wife Roberta. Suffering from clinical depression, he went to her house anyway and shot her before killing himself.

This also has the baptism pool being confused for a pool, explorations of the haunted church, burning baby dolls and a date scene at a movie theater that has no dialogue and seems to go on forever while farting synth plays. As I watched this scene, I was amazed that the movie theater workers had no gloves on and were just about bare handing the popcorn. No one cared in 1987, when this was made, about germs.

Amy does. Ralph gets in bed covered with maggots and acts like it’s not a big deal. Rightly, she goes insane screaming at him and he follows that up by having his son get hit by a car, which is bad guy karma. There’s also a scene where someone gets into a tub filled with snakes and so many poems.

Hefner couldn’t get anyone to pick this movie up. He would have in the early 1980s, as no one would care that it seems like the film stock changes and it sometimes appears shot on video. But in 1987? No, sadly. He kept all the VHS copies in the church he bought to film this in, along with his camera equipment and it all went up in flames in 2017.

Before that, he shot a few other movies. Shooting Grunts is his autobiographical story of how was a combat cinematographer in Vietnam and was seriously wounded at the battle of Khe Sanh.

Then, there’s 2008’s Bad Ghost. I can’t find a copy but it seems like a re-edit of The Ghosting, starring most of the same cast: Salmi is Jeanie, Keith Lee Morris is her boyfriend, Hutton is Dan (called Crazy Dan in this) and Edna Caldwell plays Edna, his wife, a character not in the original movie. The one photo on IMDB of Salmi looks a bit older than she was in The Ghosting. I need this movie.

I’m not saying that this is a good movie but if you know the kind of things that obsess me, you know that I loved it and will recommend it to you.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Thanks to The Schlock Pit for so much info that I used in this review.