Get an early night instead.

BA_Harrison

It's 'count the cliché' time with Midnight Movie, a derivative supernatural slasher which looks and feels just like any one of a hundred other films you might find clogging up the horror section in your local rental outlet.

Undemanding teen audiences may possibly enjoy this film's easy-on-the-eye cast, MTV-style editing and some unexceptional gore, but seasoned horror fans will no doubt find themselves rolling their eyes and groaning in disbelief at what amounts to nothing more than yet another admittedly-slick-but-totally-logic-free piece of popcorn horror packed with cookie-cutter characters, cheap scares, unanswered questions and glaring plot-holes.

The story, for what it's worth, goes something like this: five years after horror director Ted Radford disappears from a lunatic asylum, leaving 70 dead in his wake, a cinema decides to present a midnight screening of his cult movie The Dark Beneath. Before you can say 'surely Radford doesn't emerge from his film to kill members of the staff and audience', Radford emerges from the film to kill members of the staff and audience. Yawn!

Glossing over such trivial details as exactly how the director achieves his magical return to life and why he is so obsessed with scaring people in the first place, the weak script concentrates instead on presenting a myriad of predictable scenes in which the scared occupants of the cinema at first attempt to escape, but then begin to fight back.

Midnight Movie hits a 'cliché all-time-high' when it is revealed that the killer—a bargain-basement Leatherface wannabe armed with a custom-built corkscrew—can only hurt those who are afraid of him (gack!). At this point, the script becomes completely nonsensical, with final survivor Bridget (Rebekah Brandes) drawing on past painful experiences to help her overcome her fear, and trying to save her brother from within the movie.

Go see this if your idea of a good horror film is a Saw sequel or a remake of something 'old'. You'll probably enjoy it.

score 4/10

BA_Harrison 1 January 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1999704/