The basic premise of Midnight Movie is a slasher fan’s dream/nightmare come true: the killer in a horror film comes to life and starts killing people in the audience. To be sure, a few horror franchises have already taken a meta twist like that once or twice before, so it begs the question of what else Midnight Movie can bring to the table. The major criteria for slasher fans include death creativity, levels of gore, and the mythology and characterization of the killer. The disposable characters he dispatches require little to no development – because unless they’re recurring, they don’t matter squat.
Can Midnight Movie boast an impressive score in any of these categories?
What the Saw franchise lacked in panache it made up in the intricate planning of murders so visceral that they made audiences squirm reliably. Midnight Movie on the other hand really only has one mode of death: the killer carries about a little hand-screw and just punctures and slashes away with it. ‘D’ for effort there.
As one of the characters in the film notes, horror films start low on the gore side and gradually ramp it up until the killer is pretty much wading through a pool of blood. Not here. Midnight Movie has a minimal amount of gore, it’s there but it’s wholly unimpressive, especially when Director Jack Messitt needs to make up for the plain deaths of the characters.
Finally, the killer is so poorly defined beyond just “a psychopath that actually killed people to make his film, and now he’s back” that when he starts doing odd apparition-styled magic it’s just utterly non-sensical. That should be expected though since the story setting up the film and everything that happens from there on in makes little to no sense once the killer comes out of the film. If the hapless victims figure out a way to kill him that makes sense, the film just snaps back without explanation and reverses whatever they did so it can keep going.
There are much worse horror films, but there’s no excuse for making a set of rules for your film and then just defying them in an attempt to make your monster scarier. Either don’t make the rules at all or stick with the ones you did.
DVD Bonus Features
Featurettes give you a behind the scenes look with the director, writer, and the cast, a look at storyboards and the application of special effects, and a featurette about how key special effects sequences were made. Finally, a collection of deleted scenes, outtakes, and trailers round out the disc.
"Midnight Movie: The Killer Cut" is on sale June 14, 2011 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Jack Messitt. Written by Jack Messitt, Mark Garbett. Starring Jon Briddell.
