Review of The Outing

Watched this film for the first time since the 80's when it was released. I remember watching this one as a kid and the thing I remember the most is the scenes of the jinn floating around the museum chasing the last few survivors of the film. It is not bad, but at the same time it is not all that good either. Better pacing would have helped immensely, especially in terms of the kills within the film. We get three deaths right off the bat and then a period of nothing. n another death and another somewhat long stretch of nothing and then we get like seven or eight deaths in like a ten minute span. I would have preferred the deaths be space out more as it kind of takes awhile for the teens to break into the museum so the horror could begin in full instead of just teasing. Another problem is that this thing has the power to do anything, it is a genie, so I would think that every death is going to be unique and awesome. Well, that almost happens, but not entirely. We get two people torn in half, two people killed by snakes and multiple stabbings too. So, there were some good kills, the plot was interesting, but they needed more variety to the kills and maybe a better setting too.

The story has these three horrible people going to an elderly ladies house so they could find some money. Well, they drag the old lady from the bed, beat her and then put an ax into her head after they only discover a lamp and no money. Well, some sort of force causes the elderly lady to reanimate and take care of one of the intruders and tears one of them in half and takes care of the female intruder too. Well, the lamp ends up at a museum where a girl makes a very flippant wish and then we meet two more horrific people, one of which the girl used to date. I don't find it hard to believe that she dumped him, but I do find it hard to believe she ever dated him in the first place. Well the school has a field trip to the museum where the girl who now sports the same bracelet as the old woman and seems under somethings control, her boyfriend and two other couples decide to sneak back into the museum after hours for a sex party! Well, the lamp is home to a jinn and it begins to kill and make good on the girl's wish as she is to become the lamp's keeper!

If there is anything that movies from this time period have taught me, it is that young adults in the 80's always seemed to want to go to the most complicated place ever to have sex parties. Who knows why, but I've seen them going to malls, mausoleums, old mortuaries and in this film a museum. They just over complicated things back them as they would rather circumvent security systems or some such than simply go to the home of someone whose parents were gone or maybe even to one of those cool parents' houses who would not care if they were getting it on! Just makes me chuckle, and why the heck would there be a regular looking bathtub with curtains that looked as if it belonged in a house in a museum? I could see a shower stall, but not what was in this museum's basement.

So, it had its moments and it had your typically dumb 80's teens doing their usual breaking and entering to get some. What it needed was better pacing. Seriously, they had lots of death, but it was so condensed that one minute everyone is alive and getting it on and the next they are all dead! There were too many horrible people in this one too. The first group being the intruders at the beginning and then the two jerks that should have been in jail after pulling a knife on one of the teens and attempting to assault a teacher. They went over their allotment of super jerks, though I did like the one death with the mask. One final thought about this film, considering that everyone was pretty much dead at the end, I do think the girl should have just become the jinn's keeper. Seriously, her and the teacher are probably going to jail after all is said and done, because who the heck is going to believe a genie killed everyone?