THE OUTING
Way, way better than expected
Three redneck hoodlums break into an old lady's home in search of her wealth (apparently assuming that she keeps it in cash, in her house), and in their desire to not wake her up, they start throwing shit around and disturbing her pet parrot. Well, soon enough they wake her up anyway and start tearing the place apart until they find a magic lamp...anyway, soon the lady's dead, and the three punks pretty much get what they deserve from a mysterious green glow.
Yes, a genie's on the loose, and no, he's not twisting people's wishes around a la Wishmaster - he's just here to fuck you up. And six (well, eight) teens spending the night in the museum that now houses the lamp are...well, one of the (three!) taglines is "They're not coming back."
The Outing is a lot better than I'd anticipated, mostly because of an irresistible setting (it's hard to screw up setting a horror flick in such a grandly creepy place as a museum) and some skin-crawling, inventive deaths. (two deaths by snakes, two people ripped in half, and a hilarious moment when one guy gets a double-bladed axe in the head - but the other blade of the axe is still in someone else's head! Man, what a crime scene that'd make.)
The movie also gets extra points for that little extra attention to detail - like when that axe bites into its first victim, we're treated to not only blood but little chunks of brain and flesh running down the wall.
The movie takes far too long to get going, though, taking what must have been at least half its running length for those kids to finally bed down in that museum.
Thinks kind of get wonky at the end, too. The conclusion is too pat and convenient. And the djinn, when it finally shows itself, is of a very cool design but is so poorly executed, animatronically, that it's a big letdown. It also does not help when the djinn's voice is completely indecipherable unless you listen to a lot of death metal. (I could barely make it out, myself. The guy who did the voice, Jackson Bostwick, has a number of cheesy movies to his credit like the oft-brought-up-in-alt.horror The Prey, but I think he missed his calling)
And there's a one-second shot after the credits of somebody in the museum taking a bow. What's that about?
Despite all this, I mostly enjoyed this one. See it back- to-back with The Relic.