THE LAMP [1987]

 A.K.A. THE OUTING -- WHICH NO ONE ASSOCIATED WITH THE FILM CALLS IT SO I'M GONNA CALL IT "THE LAMP". 

This one was fun.  Better than it has a right to be, THE LAMP features an ancient woman's house being robbed by three petty criminals.  While ransacking the place (and sinking an axe into the old woman's head), the three stumble across a strange metal lamp just like you'd see in THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 

When the old lady dies, a dangly red-jeweled bracelet falls off her wrist and the house-breakers rub the lamp for a joke.  No joke.  Something is released from the lamp which gruesomely kills the three crooks. The antique lamp (and the dangly bracelet) makes its way to the local museum and curator Dr. Wallace whose daughter Alex comes by, rubs the lamp (cause that's what you do with Aladdin's lamps) and tries on the dangly bracelet -- which she then cannot remove from her wrist.  Alex has a kinda psychotic ex-boyfriend who is terrorizing her and her new boyfriend.  Later, Alex's class goes on a field trip to the museum and she and her friends get the neato idea to try to sneak in and spend the night inside the museum.  Psycho ex-boyfriend and his sidekick overhear and hide inside the museum until after closing time.  Unfortunately for our gang of kids, the evil genie of the lamp periodically takes over Alex's body in order to facilitate the plan so that it will have plenty of victims locked inside the museum to kill horribly!

Firstly the cast does a really good job and there's not really any bad acting going on.  The prop for the lamp is superb and the evil genie itself is a nice practical effect which the cast remember was something like 18 feet tall.  SFX like green glowing energy zaps etc. are pretty woeful but the kills feature pretty excellent gory effects.  While the 80's were full to bursting with slasher movies, this one takes a novel approach by having an evil monster djinn offing teens in interesting, gory ways.  As I said, I had a lot of fun with this one owing to the novel premise and fun kills.  There were no real slow passages which made the film drag so that's also a huge plus.  So yeah, this is definitely a low-budget horror that really tries and, for the most part, succeeds in making a very watchable and entertaining Halloweeny viewing experience.