31 Nights of Halloween Horror - The Outing aka The Lamp

 

The Outing aka The Lamp
87 mins.
Dir. Tom Daley
1987/USA


Before Wishmaster,  there was another genie or jinn looking to wreck havoc.  This one came out during everyone's favorite nostalgic VHS decade, the 80s.  With some cool box art and a reach out and grab you title, The Outing or aka...uh...The Lamp, who could resist wanting to watch this?  Maybe you missed out seeing it back then like I did.  For our first flick this month let's take a walk down memory lane, when fashion was bad, mainstream music was bad and the cheese level in movies was abundant, but we all still love them anyway.

The Outing opens with a flashback from 1893 where we get a little history of the lamp.  It is stolen by some pirate guy, a little girl has a magical bracelet and blood is splattered across the screen.  Cut to present day and three idiotic robbers break into an old woman's home looking for stuff to steal or maybe some hidden treasure or something.  I don't know, they really don't seem to have a clue to what they are doing.  The old woman turns out to be the same little girl from the beginning flashback with the magic bracelet and genie lamp, all of which doesn't bode well for the criminals.  An axe to the head, some nudity and a body torn in two and the lamp now ends up at the Natural Science Museum in Houston Texas.




Now that all that nonsense is out of the way, we focus on Dr. Wallace, the museum's curator and his daughter Alex, who happens to be at the museum when the lamp arrives.  She tries on the bracelet and gets into an argument with her dad and says, "Sometimes I wish you were dead."  With a movie about a genie, we all know where this is going.  The next day Alex's class is going on a field trip to the museum, her friends convince her that they should all sneak back into the museum after it closes and spend the night.  After all, Alex's dad runs the place, what is the worst that can happen?

From there is it 80s galore.  Bad acting, bad story, bad dialogue, but we do get some good gore scenes, nudity and are treated to a demon-looking-genie who chases Alex around the museum at the end.  And by chase, I mean the genie is pushed around on a cart by the FX team.  But all in all, this was actually a fun movie to sit through and brings you back to those glorious 80s VHS days where you took a chance on the box art and hoped for the best.









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