Review of Outing (2011) by Wes S — 07 Mar 2013

It's a shame when you come across a movie that does some of the small things right, but ultimately fails. The pacing was a bit off as it takes about an hour to set up the premise and then goes into about half an hour of action and kills. Before the characters actually even sneak into the museum we suffer through some of the most bizarre exposition as the main character Alex is terrorized by her sadistic ex-boyfriend who is a cross between Peter Stegman from Class of 1984 and Alex from A Clockwork Orange as far as how sadistic and psychotic he is.

The movie is pretty run-of-the-mill. It's what you would expect from an 80s horror movie. The characters are cardboard, their wardrobe is amazingly dated, and there seems to be absolutely nothing better to do than to sneak into a Houston museum that doesn't even look like it would be that much fun to sneak in to. I was wondering to myself what these characters would have done had there not been all the excitement of a genie trying to kill them. Sure, they could have had sex in the museum, but what was the point?

I also think I should point out the weird and dark turn the movie randomly takes for no necessary reason at the end of the movie. While Alex's ex-boyfriend has acted deranged so far in the movie by trying to run people off the road to beating up girls and pulling knives out in school fights, he and his henchman randomly decide to gang rape a friend of Alex's towards the end of the movie. Why was this even necessary? It's not that I am against violent acts depicted in movies, but this movie had so far been all camp up until this point. It just felt so out of place. We had already understood the guy was bad and deserved to get what was coming to him, so why even bother? What even happened to the black girl he raped anyway? Maybe I missed it with the extremely quick pace the movie took at the end of the movie, but the last I saw she was just screaming. Did she make it? What about the security guard? I know he shows up again after the credits, but does that mean that he survived or was it just an outtake?

Overall, I'm surprised this movie hasn't had an official DVD release. I'm sure fans of 80s horror would enjoy this if they track it down, but it's no classic. If you enjoyed movies like The Initiation then this is probably a gem worth hunting down.