Over the course of reviewing altogether too many direct-to-DVD horror films, I’ve been steadily building the argument that today’s crop of low-budget slasher films are the cultural heirs of the similarly low-budgeted sci-fi and horror films of the 50s and 60s, but have replaced their generally fun spirit with a meaner and more malevolent one. Midnight Movie has made that argument better than a review ever could. A supposedly reverently campy and fun film that quickly devolves into yet another carnival of abuses, Movie takes everything that’s supposed to be fun about horror and processes it through everything that’s become just plain hateful about the genre.
The plot of Midnight Movie is astonishingly similar to that of an Are You Afraid Of The Dark? episode, in which a couple of kids working at a movie theater run into a vampire monster (a clear reference to Nosferatu’s Count Orlock) that has emerged from the film they are screening. In this case, the group of teenagers are led by Bridget (Rebekah Brandes), an apparent survivor of serious parental abuse, who is there with her boyfriend Josh (Daniel Bonjour) and brother Timmy (Justin Baric). Also at this midnight screening are a biker named Harley (Stan Ellsworth) and his girlfriend (Melissa Steach, credited only as ‘Babe’) who just laughs amusedly as he hits on the teenage girls present, as well as Detective Barron (Jon Briddell), who is there on personal business, as the star and director of the film is a mental patient who escaped many years ago. Gradually, as they watch the film, the kids are picked off by a mysterious murderer in the theater, and…don’t kid yourself. You know exactly where this is going.
Midnight Movie plays fast and loose with the movie-within-a-movie structure, and this proves to be its greatest liability, as the film that they show (about a bunch of hippies stranded in the wilderness) is not only more entertaining than the actual movie shown, but also serves to highlight the difference in filmmaking values between that era (presumably the early 70s) and our own. Whereas the characters in that appear to be having some measure of fun spouting cornball lines as if they were a slightly more endangered version of Scooby and the gang, their modern day counterparts are joylessly subjected to torture and dismemberment (fairly anachronistically too, as the slasher depicted wouldn't be a staple of movies for another decade). Part of this is just that it’s hard to be scared by someone running for his life when we were laughing at it just a few minutes ago, but it highlights the main issue here, which is the violence perpetrated against women.
Let’s be honest: deep down, we all know what slasher movies are really about. Killing a girl with a long phallic knife (or, in this case, a big corkscrew) is a form of sex sublimation, with the chase standing in for foreplay, and the final gasps of life standing in for the satisfying climax. An avowed horror fan myself, I can admit that while some of this is as sick as it sounds, a lot of it is just sort of an extension of the way that men and women tend to interact. The ‘horror movie’ instinct is something that a lot of people develop from a young age, with a lot of boys learning that even if you’re too young to date somebody, it’s kind of fun to scare them. But chasing a girl with a live snake you just found is a lot different from pinning her to the ground and gouging out her eyes with an ice cream scoop (which doesn't happen in this film, as that'd be too interesting and creative). By the end of this film, the ‘final girl’ has suffered such a meaningless volley of abuses that we’re almost inclined to think that the director hates her and thinks she deserves them (punishment for being abused, I guess). In the old days, at least they usually got to be saved by studly, bare-chested men, which is, I guess, some form of consolation.
It might be hypocritical to excoriate this film after I’ve so passionately defended the likes of Re-Animator and Hostel: Part 2, but Midnight Movie makes another crucial mistake: it’s a ghost (or something paranomal, I guess) movie, and you don’t even find that out until about halfway through. Something else might have been able to pull that off, but by the time this turns into a slasher Purple Rose of Cairo, every plot twist feels like an excuse to justify their increasingly loony gimmicks and extend the whole mess even longer. Midnight Movie could have been a lot of fun, but it winds up getting lost in its own punchline; it’s just not up to the task.
DVD Bonus Features
Director’s Commentary
Creative Team
Cast
VFX/Storyboards
Deleted Scenes
Additional Shooting: A Storyboard Comparison
Outtakes
Trailers
"Midnight Movie" is on sale October 13, 2009 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Jack Messitt. Written by Mark Garbett, Jack Messitt. Starring Daniel Bonjour, Jon Briddell, Justin Baric, Melissa Steach, Rebekah Brandes, Stan Ellsworth.
