MIDNIGHT

Directed by John A. Russo. United States. 1982.

MIDNIGHT is a Pennsylvania-based shocker that mixes the slasher film with the backwoods redneck movie. It even tosses in some Satanic cult shenanigans for extra flavor. Sounds great, doesn’t it? I mean, how can you possibly screw that up? It’s virtually airtight. There's no way, no how, no chance in hell, this can go wrong. Take this shit to the bank. It’s solid gold on paper.

Unfortunately, John Russo wrote that paper.

Look, Russo wrote NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. You can’t take that away from him. But he also wrote SCREAM QUEENS’ NAKED CHRISTMAS, so let’s not fool ourselves into thinking Russo never left the 1960s. As a concept, MIDNIGHT is pretty damn solid. Unfortunately, the execution does it in. I’ve seen better execution in cartel videos. Less painful ones, too. Every bad choice a filmmaker can make was made here. Every single worst line of dialogue that ever popped into Russo’s mind is in this screenplay. It is shockingly awful.

We begin with a whole family of weirdos menacing a young girl. She’s terrified, her foot caught in a bear trap. “She’s a demon, isn’t she, Mama?” asks one of the younger yokels. Mama tells her kids to be careful. “She’s a demon. They can look like anything they want.” Before you can say ‘Gertrude Baniszewski’, Mama instructs her eldest to bop the young girl unconscious with a stick. They take her home, draw inverted pentagrams on their foreheads in magic marker, and sacrifice her to Satan. Why would a Satanist sacrifice a demon during a black magic ritual? I don’t know, kids. Why would anyone watch this movie? That’s the real question.

We then meet 17-year-old Nancy as she fights off her drunk stepfather’s attempts to rape her. Believe it or not, 'rape-happy stepfather' is not Lawrence Tierney’s most unfortunate role. Nancy clubs him in the head with her portable radio, packs her clothes, and fucks off out of there for California. Unfortunately, the only decent ride she can get is a van going to Florida. The guys in the van are Hank, an African American man, and Tom, a honky. Hank isn’t thrilled with Nancy tagging along, but Tom sure is. He’s a bit smitten, and a little bit hopeful, too.

We head back to Nancy's house to watch Ol' Rapey bullshit his wife over why he’s stumbling around the house with his shirt wide open and a radio-shaped dent in his head. He tells his wife that Nancy came onto him, probably because she’s an unhappy teenager or a slut or something. The wife doesn’t buy it. Eventually, Ol' Rapey realizes that Nancy might report his inappropriate groping to the cops. He heads off to track her down. Bold choice to make the hero of the story a pedophilic rapist. Love that Russo.

The incessant, horrible theme song hasn’t made me turn the movie off (yet), so I got to sit back and watch our trio stop for gas and meet the town Reverend and his daughter. They agree to give him a ride home, dropping him off near an old cemetery. We also learn that the town these characters are in is very racist. The film is set in Butler County, PA. I’ve been throughout that area and can confirm that it is very, very white. This cemetery scene is scored by odd buzzing and beeping electronic noise. At first, I thought my speakers might be dying. That’s exactly what you want to say about a movie. Put that on the slipcover for the next 4k remaster.

"It sounded like my speakers were dying" - Dave Grant, Films That Witness Madness.

Did I mention Tom Savini turned down FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART 2 to make this film? Fucking idiot.

Anyway, the Reverend’s daughter heads home to make tea while her father prays at his dead wife’s tombstone. He somehow doesn’t notice the fat, giggling lunatic in overalls standing in the bushes two feet away. The lunatic, Cyrus, stabs the Reverend to death. He then kills the daughter too. He drowns her in the bathtub. Well, he drowns her by holding her face under the running bathtub faucet. I didn’t even know that was possible.

Tom and Hank stop in a bar to buy a six-pack only to have every racist in town give them shit. Even the local cops tell them to head for the border. In retaliation, our trio steals a few bags of groceries from a store. They don’t load up a cart and then roll it out the front door. No, they literally wait until the girl behind the counter rings up each item and bags them. Then they grab the bags and hightail it. Amateurs.

The cops then engage them in a low-speed chase. Our trio manages to lose them, but I’m entirely sure how. They were driving straight the whole time. How did the cops not see them make a left-hand turn at the first chance? They pull off onto a secluded dirt road and come within feet of running over Cyrus. The fact that they just saw a weird guy carrying an obvious body wrapped in a sheet doesn’t change their plans for camping out under the stars.

Nancy wakes up first, and she wanders off to see the sights. Hank and Tom, however, wake up at gunpoint. Two police officers, one played by Romero regular John Amplas, cuff our boys, accusing them of killing a girl. Nancy cowers in the bushes and watches as the cops summarily execute them. Our trio is now an uno. Nancy runs off with the cops in hot pursuit. Because this is a TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE rip-off, she runs into the first house she finds only to discover, GASP SHOCK, the cops aren’t cops, and the homeowners aren’t friendly.

The house belongs to the family we saw at the start of the film. The cops, Luke and Abraham, are two of the sons, along with their giggling idiot brother, Cyrus (he’s the Leatherface of this particular Sawyer clan). They have a sister, a cutie pie named Cynthia, who speaks with a weird English-sounding accent. There’s even a mummified family member in an upstairs room, only it’s not a grandparent. It’s dear dead Mama. They stick Nancy in a small animal cage next to another captive, Gwen. The plan is to sacrifice these girls one-by-one on consecutive midnights and feed their blood to Mama. They believe that will resurrect her.

With Nancy locked in a cage, the rest of the movie (more or less) follows Ol' Rapey’s attempts to track her down. I’ll spare you those details because I don’t want to think about them. I don’t even want to finish this review. I’m not sure what else I can say. The acting is atrocious, but I’m not sure I can fault the actors when the screenplay is this awful. I think Laurence Olivier would struggle with this shit. It’s difficult to succeed when you’ve been set up to fail.

The worst offender, however, is Tom Savini. Aside from a single gunshot wound to the head, there are no decent effects anywhere in this film. The mummified mother makeup looks worse than if they just used a puppet (or a real corpse), and all the throat slicing is clearly done by placing a tube on the backside of a dull blade. It’s the laziest effects work Savini has ever done. I understand completely that this was a very low-budget film, but he’s done more with less. His work is bafflingly bad here.

But what really burns my toast is that this film could have been great. Or at least good. Well, passable. It definitely could have been passable. The story is fine. It’s absolutely workable. This kind of narrative has fueled some of the most entertaining horror films around. As I said, the execution is just not there. It’s too slow, the characters are too flat, and there’s no last-minute twist or narrative surprises. The killers have no personality or energy at all, sleepwalking through every single scene. Contrast these lame, uninteresting characters with the Sawyer Family. The writing deficiencies become crystal clear. Our sole heroine spends much of the third act locked in a cage. Our only hero is a pedo child abuser. The violent revenge, when it finally comes, is comically anemic. It is an unrelenting, unmitigated buzzkill.

MIDNIGHT has absolutely nothing going for it. Russo should have quit while he was ahead. You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the guy who wrote MY UNCLE JOHN IS A ZOMBIE.

Don’t be John Russo, kids. Quit.