Midnight

Midnight (1982)

When a young girl named Nancy runs away from her stepfather and his less than fatherly advances she ends up trying to hitchhike to California. She gets picked up by a couple of nice guys who themselves end up dead by the hands of a scary family of hillbilly Satanists. Nancy gets tossed into a dog kennel next to another girl and awaits the Easter weekend where they will be sacrificed to Satan at of course midnight. Lucky for Nancy her stepfather has decided to track her down and comes to save her, without of course the sheriff whom he called to find out where the rednecks lived. He also manages to wait until they have killed the other girl, but then these things happen I suppose. While he manages to spring Nancy and kill most of the family of course he misses on and ends up stuck to the wrong end of a knife, leaving Nancy to run for her life. I don’t know about you guys but next time I save someone from a family of hillbilly Satanists I’m definitely going to bring the sheriff and as a rule shoot ever Satanist I find.

This is a terrible movie. The plot is a hodgepodge of story-lines from other movies, with a twist of racism added in for fun. The movie starts off like a road picture with the three characters headed down the road in their van. They run into some scary racist rednecks and decide to get back at them by stealing groceries. Which of course is exactly what any sane unarmed person would to do a town full of armed nuts that already don’t like you. Then partway thru the movie they run into a crazy family of redneck killers that have a definite Texas Chainsaw feel to them. If that weren’t enough the family has the desiccated body of their dead mother around to talk to (Psycho anyone?). Toss in an undeveloped back-story about killing demons and you have a mess of a film that makes no sense at all. What can you say about a cast like the one in Midnight? Well for one they stink. Really other than a criminally underused John Amplas and a solid performance by Lawrence Tierney this is amateur hour. I especially like the “teenage” Nancy who is played Melanie Verlin. Not only is she a terrible actress, but she looks like she is in her thirties, not anywhere near seventeen.

The only thing at all slightly worthwhile from a technical standpoint with Midnight would be a couple of the special effects. There is a nice looking bullet hit on a head and a couple of nice throat slashes that look decent. I’m guessing this is due to the efforts of Tom Savini, who is credited with the special effects. As for the rest of the movie I’m not too impressed. There is a crappy theme song for the movie that is played over and over again, regardless of whether it is appropriate for the scene at all. Also some of the scenes are horribly staged. During one of the abductions there is a shot from behind the crazed family looking towards a couple playing Frisbee. They are maybe fifteen feet away and in plain sight, but the actress is playing like she can’t see them. Shouldn’t a director have a better setup than that, especially one that runs a film school? (Okay that was a cheap shot…) The biggest disappointment for me would have to be the ending of the movie. This could have been an interesting sequence with Nancy being stalked around the house but is ruined by terrible lighting and camera work. You can’t even see what is going on in what is supposed to be the exciting conclusion of the movie!

I was disappointed, but given director John Russo’s track record with movies that don’t include participation with George Romero I’m not really surprised. Trust me when I say this isn’t worth wasting your time on. I don’t recommend Midnight.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer