This year, film fans, we finally got the sequel we thought would never happen. After what seems like a lifetime, the retro vibes are back, landing from the skies on a highway to the danger zone! No, not Top Gun: Maverick, but Out There Halloween Mega Tape, the second part to 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special.
If you enjoyed WNUF, you need not know anything further to place this follow-up atop your watchlist. However, inquiring minds wanna know, so allow me to indulge them.
WNUF’s gifted director, Chris LaMartina (What Happens Next Will Scare You), continues the faux-show aesthetic without repeating the same joke. This time, we get two back-to-back programs, seemingly recorded years apart on the same VHS tape. First, a Halloween-themed episode of tabloid talk show Ivy Sparks, in which the eponymous and costumed host (Call Girl of Cthulhu’s Melissa LaMartina, absolutely nailing the Jenny Jones-style shenanigans) interviews a would-be vampire, alien abductees and someone claiming to have sex with the ghost of a Civil War widow.
Following that half-hour is an hourlong broadcast of Out There from Oct. 31, 1996. Co-hosted by a post-Sparks Sparks, the show airs live from a farm reported to be the site of recent UFO activity. Although it’s obviously akin to Fox’s Sightings and its infamous Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction special, to say more would spoil the surprises. What doesn’t ruin a thing is mentioning how accurately Mr. LaMartina captures the low-rent appeal of “the fourth network”’s exploitative programming of the time.
Of course, that UHF parodic pulse carries through each morsel of Mega Tape’s real meat: the commercials. As with WNUF, they’re dead-on, here with parodies of Cops, the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Pure Moods CD and Lorenzo Lamas’ Renegade syndicated series, plus station IDs, PSAs, newsbreaks and even lotto numbers. From spots for movies, toys, CD-ROM video games, a trucking school and local restaurants (“I’ve got a prescription for pepperoni!” exclaims Dr. Pizza), the ads are — like the whole of Out There Halloween Mega Tape — endlessly creative and pure pleasure. —Rod Lott