John’s Horror Corner: The Outing (1987), and the attack of the evil giant Gremlin genie!

MY CALL:  Eh, I guess I was entertained.  Extremely random; occasionally funny.  IF YOU LIKE THIS THEN WATCH:  Wishmaster (1997) and sequels make much more sense of the evil genie and “be careful what you wish for” theme.  Equally crazy but better done and more interesting for the era were Deadly Blessing (1981) and The Sentinel (1977), and even the misdirected and awful The Nesting (1981) was better than this.  ALTERNATE TITLE: The Lamp, which makes waaaay more sense than The Outing. What was this “outing?”  The school trip to the museum?  Terrible titl

Some young criminals break into some old gypsy’s house, axe-murder the venerable homeowner as she’s trying to warn them away, and find a lamp dry-walled into the foundation.  Immediately weird shit starts to happen.  Not 10 minutes into the movie the axe-murdered gypsy axe-murders her axe-murderer with the murdering axe that is still embedded in her axe-murdered head.  Then his buddy is cut in half by some animated ectoplasm and their slutty tagalong is air-strangled by an invisible force after sprinting naked through the house.  [Best opening sequence in a bad horror EVER!  Also, most use of axe-murder in one paragraph EVER!]

I later realized that my “gypsy” was an Arab.  So the lamp and some of the Arab’s other effects are moved to a museum and we learn the lamp is 5500 years old!  The lamp imprisons a Djinn (aka, Jinn or genie) and, during a high school field trip, some chick unleashes the Djinn and then plots with her friends to spend the night in the museum.  Why do that?  There is nothing cool or rebellious about spending a night in a museum.

Overnight some ridiculous stuff happens.  A chick takes a bath (in a museum!) and is attacked by a coil of cobras, we just “find” her boyfriend with his body cut in half, a guy’s head is twisted around, random animated objects stab people on their own, a guy is bitten on the balls by a cobra, a Central American mummy goes zombie on someone…just totally random, unwarranted kills.

Speaking of random, this mummy was totally uncovered in the museum.  Unless this is a children’s museum, I assure you someone’s kids are going to mess that thing up!

This is what happens if you feed a mogwai steroids after midnight.

When we finally see the animatronic genie it looks like a mix between the demons from The Gate (1987) and a giant Gremlin.

An anthropologist tries to fight it with a fire extinguisher, which doesn’t go well.  Luckily, a 1987 computer program provides the answer of how to kill a genie.  So they kill it.  However, on a major error on the writer’s part, they discovered this “how to kill a genie program” while the genie was pretending to be the guy who found the program.  So, evidently, the genie revealed how its enemies should kill it while it was hiding among them. WTF!?!

I’d skip this one.  But if you insist, you’ll probably find a few laughs and perhaps the opening scenes are worth it on their own.

Whoa!  Who’s up for a game of Dungeons & Dragons or HeroQuest?  Okay.  So I’m the old wizard on the left and I use my +1 magic lamp to defeat the lizard man and the medusa chick!  BOOM!  I just went up a level and gained a fire spell.  Now chicks will dig me!

[below] looks like the cousin of the demon minotaur from Legend is hunting down teenagers.