Curiosity almost always gets the better of me when it comes to horror flicks-and Midnight Movie's potential promise won out over the little voice in the back of my head saying this is gonna suck...-and I'm glad it did, because Messitt's film is an entertaining piece of low-budget slasher cinema that succeeds despite some problems.
In a lot of ways, Midnight Movie reminds me of the 1980s-a time when slasher flicks ruled the horror world and dominated theaters and video store shelves. It also reminds me, in a sort of weird way that doesn't make sense based on subject matter so much as tone, of Night of the Creeps. Like that film, Midnight Movie surprised me with its effectiveness and the director's seemingly obvious love of the genre. I watched both of those films with low expectations and came away pleased (albeit far more so with Night of the Creeps, which remains a personal favorite of mine even today)-no small feat when so many movies manage to find ways to let me down even with lowered expectations. Both movies demonstrate that low budget films can be effective genre pieces and entertaining without A-list casts, CGI, or multi-million dollar budgets. Clearly, Creeps is the superior film, but Midnight Movie manages to nail the same fun low-budget vibe...at least until the end, when it derails slightly.
The film focuses on a group of folks attending a midnight screening of the long forgotten horror film, The Dark Beneath. It seems that the writer/director/star of the film, one Ted Radford, went missing from an insane asylum five years earlier (during a brutal massacre of staff and patients). A cop and one of the surviving doctors show up in hopes that Radford will make an appearance (at which point they can take him back into custody). The group of theater employees (led by Rebekah Brandes' Bridget), their friends, and patrons (including Stan Ellsworth as burly biker Harley) have no clue about the film's dark history. What happens then is never really explained, but somehow Radford's masked killer in the film manages to come off the screen and pick off viewers one by one. When this happens, the people in the audience can see the events happening as if they were part of the actual film. No one figures out what's going on for the first few kills, but once they do they discover that they can't leave the theater and no one on the outside can get in (or see them for that matter).
With the Radford character Midnight Movie has crafted a pretty decent (if also pretty generic) slasher film villain. Radford wears a mask (like Freddy, Jason, and Leatherface) and dispatches his victims with a signature weapon (which looks like one of those twisty handled hole diggers-only way sharper), but he's not a particularly well developed creation. While the aforementioned horror icons managed to grow through countless sequels, they at least gave an audience some clue of what they were all about in their first appearances. Midnight Movie never does this with Radford-we never learn why the events at the sanitarium happened, or why he walks with a pronounced limp in the film, or even what his purpose his for all of this carnage. This is probably the film's biggest shortcoming-audiences will wait for answers to all of these questions, but the film can't ever be bothered with even trying to come up with a reason. Yeah, they'll throw in some mumbo jumbo about not letting him know you're scared late in the game, but it never goes anywhere or makes much sense. Plus it still leaves all those other questions unanswered...
The other place where the film drops the ball is in the final act, wherein the action shifts from the theater to somewhere different (I won't spoil it, so you'll have to accept my vague description). This last part of the film doesn't work as well as everything that's come prior to it and it almost feels like Messitt and company simply ran out of ideas for inside the theater and tried to move the film somewhere else. This is particularly disappointing because up until this point, Midnight Movie had done a surprisingly decent job of staging a horror flick inside a movie theater (which seems like it should be easy to do, but apparently isn't because there are so few movies out there that have managed to pull it off).
Those are the only two real flaws though-once you get past them, Midnight Movie is the kind of low-budget delight that doesn't seem to come along nearly often enough. It'll never win awards for acting or direction or the script (although the direction is surprisingly decent) and it's clearly been inspired by Texas Chainsaw Massacre (The Dark Beneath plays a lot like TCM), but no one ever said every movie has to be Citizen Kane. Adventurous horror fans looking for a light slasher to kill an evening will want to give Midnight Movie a shot. I don't know that Ted Radford will ever become a horror film icon like the ones who inspired his creation, but his first foray into the world of feature films is entertaining even though it raises far more questions than it answers.