Tagline: "Ghouls just want to have fun..."
Director: Jack Bender
Release Year: 1985
Runtime: 94 min
Streaming Platforms:
Plot Summary: Phil, Melissa, Mitch, Mary, and Vinnie are high school friends, who unwittingly raise the dead on Halloween night. Once the dead have returned, Pitchford Cove will never be the same again....or will it?
Holidays:
It is Halloween in the small town of Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts, and five high school friends, Phil (Lee Montgomery), Mary (Pfeiffer), Mitch (DeLuise), Vinnie (Burton), and Melissa (Belafonte-Harper), plan on making it a night they will never forget. They steal outfits from the town's historic museum and come upon other old artifacts, including an old trunk encasing a paper scroll which contains an ancient curse. When the latent sorceress Melissa recites the curse at the local cemetery, things take a turn for the worse.
The town's dead, led by Melissa's great-great-great-great-grandmother Lucinda Cavender (Jonelle Allen), a witch who was put to death 300 years earlier, rise up from their graves and roam the town. As Melissa, Vinnie, Mitch, and Mary enjoy themselves at their annual Halloween costume party, Phil encounters a mysterious girl, named Sandra "Sandy" Matthews (Jonna Lee), dressed in a vintage 1950s cheerleader outfit, who warns him that the whole town is in danger.
Meanwhile, Lucinda and the various undead crash the costume party. At first, nobody pays much attention to them since everyone is in costume. However, Lucinda begins turning the party guests into vampires, starting with her great-great-great-great-granddaughter Melissa.
When Sandy discovers that Phil and his friends recited the ancient spell in the cemetery, they realize that the whole town is being overrun by the living dead and decide to team up to break the curse. The only way to do so is to find the Grenville Spirit Ring inside the grave of a witch-hunter Nathaniel Grenville - who, coincidentally, was Phil's great-great-great-great-grandfather and slave owner of Lucinda Cavender, her arch-nemesis - and use it to undo the curse. Phil and "good ghost" Sandy must restore the town to normal by midnight before it is too late and the curse becomes permanent.
When the local police do not take Phil and Sandy's warning seriously, Phil manages to get his father's hunting rifle to make silver bullets from his father's silver coin collection so they can use the silver bullets which appears to be effective against the undead. When the couple ventures to the Halloween party, they discover everyone turned into zombies, vampires, witches or other evil creatures. Phil manages to get the Grenville Spirit Ring from Zombie Mitch, after which he and Sandy drive to the town's cemetery. They break into Grenville's crypt and take his bones-and-dust remains to use to seal the scroll, just as Lucinda and the horde of undead attack. Cornered in Phil's car, he and Sandy manage to use candle wax to seal the parchment scroll. After Sandy tells Phil she loves him, every creature resurrected on that night vanishes, the wounds that Phil sustains disappear, and the damage to his car is undone—as if the entire event had never happened.
Phil finds Sandy's grave and finally understands that she had been one of the undead too. As the clock strikes midnight, Phil begins to drive back to town, and as he is pulling out of the cemetery, he hears a music dedication on his car radio from 'Sandy,' implying that she will always be looking after him even from beyond the grave.
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