Having waded through the thousands of free horror titles on my cable system, I am naturally drawn first to Family Reunion (1989). The reasons? I had never heard of it, it came out in 1989, and it had no cover art. And, most importantly, my stupidity. Like a delusional fool panning for gold, I ended up with a so-so story about a family stranded in a ghost town. Tom Andrews (Mel Novak) drives the family - wife, two kids, and chain smoking grandpa - to the in-laws on Christmas Eve with a detour in the ghost town of Sutterville, Nevada ("Billy really wants to see it."). Grandpa reallllllly doesn't like this idea, but a supernatural force drags the station wagon into the town. The cause of all of this? A weird dude who looks like a bug-eyed early '80s Lars Ulrich who was picked up by the cops (including Jack Starrett) in the abandoned town (why the cops are patrolling a ghost town is never explained). Seems he ran a Satanic cult back in the day and was murdered 40 years ago. Writer-director Michael Hawes has only one other behind-the-scenes credit, co-writing the great One Dark Night (1982). He is in love with psychic abilities as the bad guy here has them too. But it is all handled so poorly. It is the kind of film where the wife wanders the abandoned hotel, finds a pentagram necklace and a ghost woman says, "Put it on" and the wife immediately asks, "Um, listen, you wouldn't happen to know what happened to our car battery, would you?" No "who the hell are you?" nonsense here; this woman wants answers! The kind of movie where I realize 12 hours later that the grandpa character leaves one scene and we never, ever find out what happened to him! The Christmas setting serves no purpose except for an end scene stinger where the family gets a present from the cult leader a year later. Ho ho boo! I liked the ghost town location and wish a better film had been made there.
Review of Family Reunion
