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Midnight Movie, for those who do not count themselves amongst the halls of horror academe, is like The Purple Rose of Cairo meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For the rest of us, it basically steps all over the dick of Lamberto Bava’s Demons. If you still don’t know what I am talking about, I’ll break it down for you: there is a movie called The Dark Beneath, and when the movie is screened, the killer steps down off the screen and kills people for real. He then drags them back into the movie, where they live forever in death. It sounds delightfully existential, but, alas, it is anything but delightful. I would go so far as to say it eats a bag of shit.
Bridget is the very unlikely night manager of a seedy second-run theater, and the invisible owner makes the very strange decree: Show a horror film at midnight that no one has ever heard of, and no one is buying tickets for, and against the advice of his exclusively teenaged employees. Sounds like it is going for the verisimilitude that gets you invested in the characters, right? We then get a glimpse of Bridget’s little brother, Timmy, and her boyfriend, Josh, and the implication that Bridget and Timmy are abused at home. That way we know they better than us, and are going to have the experience and pluck to beat this evil. Rounding out the cannon fodder are Josh’s retarded friend Mario, and by that comparison I mean no offense to retarded people, Mario’s sorostitute girlfriend Samantha, and an obnoxious biker couple so generic that their names are Harley and Babe, respectively. And in addition to the two aforementioned younger theater employees, we of course have the cop and doctor who were there when the actor playing the killer in the movie originally lost his shit. Okay, I’ll back that up a little. It is hard to explain, because it makes no sense in the movie to begin with. Apparently the man who played the killer also wrote, directed, and produced The Dark Beneath, and went insane afterward, thinking the movie was real and was placed in a mental asylum. And when his treatment was stepped up to include watching the movie as therapy, he bit his wrists open and painted the floor with cultish symbols. The next morning there was blood splashed all over the walls, and not only was every single person in the place dead, but guess who’s body was never recovered? Yup. Wonder where he went. Hmmm.
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Physician: Heal Thyself! |
No, this is totally not reminiscent of any other films. Of course not. | The essential problem with the film is that it apes its predecessors with no seeming knowledge of what really makes them tick, and no love for the grittiness and viscera of the good ones. The film is lit well enough, in the sense that we can see what is happening, but the cinematography is flat and uninteresting, akin to a made for TV movie. The characters are neither realistic for their age and environment nor as picture pretty as a soap opera cast. The effects are gory on par with the very best of haunted houses, but don’t quite cut the mustard for a film. Hell, if they were just Bisquick and fake blood like some 70’s cheesefest they would have been more welcome than the wishy-washy shit this movie perpetrates. The villain himself is a hodgepodge of masked marauders that have come before. He wears a mask, half leather and half skull, though whether the top half was supposed to be part of the mask or his actual skull is up for debate. His weapon is some weird spiral blade thing that he is constantly sharpening, and his signature move is dragging one foot, like it was broken or deformed. When he begins speaking late in the movie, he has a very calm and erudite voice, which is not to the positive for a demented serial killer. Oh, and of course his willing accomplice is his insane mother, because you have to have one of those.
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