User reviews

I can see why some of you would turn this off pretty quickly. Midnight Movie obviously was not blessed with a big budget or the best actors. A couple of time in the beginning the thought, "Oh man, I think I may have wasted my money on this one" ran through my head. With nothing to lose, I continued to watch the film and slowly but surely was won over by the spirit of this film.

The premise of the film itself is somewhat original. After a director of an old low budget cult film becomes dangerously obsessed with his film, he is locked up in an insane asylum and is forced to watch his film on the idea that him watching this may somehow relax his growing obsession. He disappears in a bloodbath and all the remaining people left in the asylum are slaughtered.

Several years later, the film is shown again at an Indy move theater in a small town. Convinced that the missing director will show, the two police officers wait patiently while the movie begins to play. As the small crowd in the theater and the few workers start showing up in the scenes and being brutally murdered, the crowd quickly finds out that this is no ordinary movie.

There are, as with most current low budget slashers, several problems within this film. However, most of them seem to stem from the budget and I really felt that this film was directed and ultimately done the best possible way considering the low budget and the range of the talent. Our creepy cinema slasher is truly a horrifying creature complete with amazing mask and gimp leg. The director shows he has definitely done his horror homework and provides his audience with "Scream" like clichés to keep the flow consistent and of course, all of us viewers consistently entertained.

If you a true fan of the horror genre and are not particularly bothered by the downfalls of a current low budget slasher film then I say give this a try. I am certain that many of you will be as pleasantly surprised with 'Midnight Movie' as I was.

Sure, it's B-Grade, the killer's costume is awful and the acting isn't particularly good. But why do we need any of that in a slasher? Since the days of Scream the slasher has been my favorite sub-genre, and finding fresh new entries can be hard. That's why I was delighted to discover Midnight Movie.

The film takes it's time establishing characters and showing off it's creepy story. Speaking of which is quite interesting.

When things do pick up, they never stop coming. The gore is delightfully over-the top and the slightly stupid characters make for speedy, fun deaths. Unlike many others, I had no irks with the killer's weapon and thought the setting was brilliant.

However, MM is not for the feint of heart. Beforementioned gore and a helping of scary atmosphere and set pieces make things rather horrifying for the typical slasher fan. So proceed with caution, oh weak stomached viewers.

All in all, MM is fresh, inventive and delightfully insane. Everything you could ask for in a slasher.

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.

Midnight Movie combines the tedium of by-the-numbers slasher plotting with an absolutely unintelligible storyline into a steaming pile of cinematic effluent unworthy of the calories you'll spend flipping the channel. The only entertainment value comes at the expense of craptacular acting, and from gazing across the vistas of stunningly deep plot holes. It would be easy to blame this fiasco on its paltry budget. But as movies like Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity have abundantly illustrated, an interesting story can be told on a shoe string, and shot in weeks - or even a weekend. To get to that point, a writer needs to spend a lot of time crafting the project, and the director needs to plan every shot. Midnight Movie seems to have been written on the set, and directed without any sense of drama. Absolutely every attempted scare is telegraphed so far in advance that any viewer not throwing back Vicoden and vodka will want to yell "get on with it," at the screen. Film schools should include this in their curricula of Hack Studies.

Director: Jack Messitt

Stars: Rebekah Brandes, Daniel Bonjour, Brea Grant, Greg Cirulnick, Mandell Maughan, Stan Ellsworth, Melissa Steach, Jon Briddell, Michael Swan, Michael Schwartz, Justin Baric

Synopsis: An obscure 70's slasher flick is being screened as the midnight movie of a theater. Little do the patrons know but the celluloid baddie is stalking the hallowed halls of the popcorn palace picking them off one by one.

Thoughts: "Midnight Movie" is a decent enough slasher. It has an interesting approach to the killer and a rather cool weapon of choice (a custom made corkscrew device) not to mention plenty of the beautiful people to stack next to the projector. The visual presentation is fine as is the audio design. The production is a typical presentation for this kind of offering not too boring but not too challenging either. The script revels in the usual clichés of the slasher genre and is quite vague as to reason for the action but grab a bit of popcorn and have a kill and a smile.

3.5 / 5

Growing up, the movies I loved were The Lion King, Back to the Future, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and pretty much any horror movie I could get my hands on. Especially slashers. My dad introduced me to Halloween and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I used to catch unfortunately-edited TV marathons of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films all the time, and when I turned 10, a little movie called Scream was released. Obviously, I wasn't a sheltered child. So it wasn't difficult to finally have a theatre experience with my favorite genre, and I really cut my teeth on the postmodern wave, debating with my friends the superiority of Scream versus I Know What You Did Last Summer. Now, the smugness of these gets hated on today. But I knew the conventions and clichés, and it made sense to me that the characters would be equally informed, acting accordingly when being chased down. Eventually the tide of horror shifted though, to Japanese pseudoghosts and zombie everything and splatter flicks, and the slashers were resigned to remakes/reboots that upped the gore but brought nothing new to the table. It is here that the low-budget gem Midnight Movie (The Killer Cut) really shines. It brings back the meta, taking place in a rundown theatre showing a 70s cult slasher film that manages to overlap with the primary reality. Armed with an over-sized corkscrew, the killer fetches his victims from the audience. The premise is both inventive and evocative. As are the kills, which don't rely on gore for impact. As far as scares are concerned, it's pretty tame by my standards, but there were definitely some covered eyes around me. This is a B-movie without question, but across the board the effort is solid and never ceases to be entertaining. The characters are varied and acted out believably, and you'll find delight, concern, and surprise in the fates that befall them. After all, who gets killed and how is what a slasher is all about. There's even room for a sequel, but this isn't shoved down your throat. In my somewhat jaded perspective, I expected another laughably bad modern horror entry here, but was pleasantly surprised to just sit back and feel like a kid again.

Stop the madness, this is awful stuff. Not even in a good way, just terrible cheap production in every manner of speaking, acting, sets, direction, etc. The reviews got me excited to see find some value here...bit sadly it's another husk of film for the garbage heap.

This is one of those pleasant surprises that come by every now and then. Ostensibly, it looks like a really bad horror movie made with no money, having little acting talent, and story lines that would make even the most imaginative cringe with disbelief. Fear not: Midnight Movie has a great deal going for it. Let's examine what its detractors are: (1)very limited budget yet used effectively throughout much of the film (2)limited acting skill particularly with the female cast members (3)excessive blood(just not MY cup of tea) and (4)some strange and bizarre plot strands that are never fully explained. Most of these are not real threats to the overall quality of the film. The movie opens with a crazed man in a psych ward watching some old 16mm film that we later discover he directed, wrote, and produced. He watches and then everyone within 20 yards is brutally murdered. The opening credits then come on with some really inappropriate music and then we see an old, somewhat dilapidated movie theater(old style with balcony and all) five years later about to show a midnight showing of his old film The Dark Beneath. We are introduced to the movie theater staff - the teen-aged girl implausibly left in charge is the female lead of the film. We meet several patrons(though very, very few) and a police detective and psych doctor coming there on a hunch that the crazed killer will return whilst his film is being shown. Oh, of course, we also get the manager's little brother in for extra measure. Now all of this is pretty pedestrian stuff. Where Midnight Movie really shines is its use of a movie within a movie. The Dark Beneath showing on the big screen is effectively shot in old seventies style with a grainy feel, actors and actresses looking like those films had back then, and perverse plot lines that really swelled during that era. The film within a film is reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as we see a van with three girls and one nerdy guy(even one of the patrons watches in disbelief that this guy could be with three chicks)and they have a van problem and go to a lone nearby house they saw on the way. Needless to say the deaths are done just like in that film with the huge door being moved and bodies dragged in from the floor. The killer is incredibly creepy. The murderous tool very inventive, and that whole film within a film idea explodes into bringing the present to the past via the film. I don't remember ever seeing anything quite like that before on film. You then get what you would expect with a film like this. Much of it done fairly well I guess. The ending, for me, was quite absurd, but I really, really enjoyed that film within a film.

Watched this one as the plot was innovative and interesting to me but as I had expected, the same happened. Its good only for those who love mindless slasher flicks. And seriously its no different from any other slashers. The plot collapses after sometime and all that is left is the bloodbath and splatters of blood. Yeah on gore level its definitely good but on critical level, it fails. The execution of the movie is really poor with some bad acts menacing the situation further. The cinematography is nice with some nice camera angles to enhance the scenes. But that's the only good point in it. You may watch it if you don't have anything else to do as it won't bore you but its not at all up to the mark.

Sometimes just the premise of a movie can intrigue me enough to pluck it out of a long line-up of various straight-to-video titles at the local store and give a chance. Midnight Movie is one of these movies, a premise that while not totally original (one can look back to Last Action Hero or an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark that took this premise already, and had Nosferatu to boot), could be entertaining in the right hands. Sadly, those hands don't belong to first-time director Jack Messitt. He takes the premise - a serial killer who made a horror movie in the 70s, The Dark Beneath, comes back to kill the hapless kids and biker and cops in a low-rent movie theater at a midnight screening - and doesn't give it much surprise or invention or characters to really care about.

There is, I should say, one semi-creative kill involving the killer driving his drill through one body straight through into another body without having to move much. But the killer himself isn't too threatening past the basic half-skull profile and a corkscrew-drill thing that allows for only so much to do with it. The acting is also mostly very basic and sometimes pretty sub-par (the kid playing the little boy is just downright awful), and the only saving grace, the actor playing the biker, is saddled with a two-dimensional dude who ends up being afraid of small places.

The kills are at best basic in a bloody sort of way, so what else is there? There's clips from the Dark Beneath, which is shot in black and white and a rip-off of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho. This might be fine if the filmmaker added something else, but no such luck. It's like the rest of the film: uninspired and with the feeling that whatever promise it has is wasted pretty quickly. It isn't too long, there is that (82 minutes with wonky credits), yet the ending is also kind of odd: the rules of how the characters go in and out of the movie seem to be set until the last ten minutes, where it just turns into camp without the humor.

Midnight Movie is a supernatural slasher film that has gathered some inexplicable praise. It even apparently won best film at the Chicago Horror Film Festival; I don't want to watch the runners-up.

The plot has a group of movie theater patrons becoming trapped when a cursed horror film from the early 1970's is shown. The film within the film is a variation on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a group of hippies breaking down and seeking shelter in the home of a psychopath. The murderer from this film within a film comes out of the screen and begins killing the audience members, sort of like the much superior 1985 film Demons.

I worked in a movie theater. I was never a projectionist, but I did visit the booth from time to time. I know what 35mm film projectors are supposed to look like. What's more the filmmakers of Midnight Movie should know this as well since this is their field. The film within a film here is playing at a movie theater on a 16mm projector and consists of one reel. How long would that make the film within a film? I would guess fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Also, throwing in a line about how cheap the theater is does not justify the set up. A cheap theater would run second run product of recent movies. A black and white horror film from the 1970's (?) which is known for having caused its director to go insane would not be randomly playing at a mom and pop theater in the 21st Century. This film would be showing as a gala event at a film festival or a cult theater like The Alamo Draft House!

Midnight Movie is a lame horror movie with a promising central idea. Unfortunately, bad directing, bad acting, and too bright lighting (almost like a soap opera) kill all the tension. Nothing, nothing in this film (or the film within a film) convinces for a moment.

I first I think this was going to be a really bad movie but it turned out be a good movie not a GREAT! movie.

A number of people go to watch a old movie in the cinema, meanwhile two police investigator come investigator something about this movie, the last time this movie was played some people were killed.

They get ready to watch movie and this movie as some humour added in that will make you laugh(if you like fart jokes).

Then people start to get killed in the cinema and they are seen on the big screen by the viewers and at first they think its a part of movie but it's not long before they discover that people they saw die on big screen in movie was real and that they know killer is real too.

I think movie may have be inspired by Coming soon (2008) but that movie is more of a ghost story, however to me this movie felt more like a upgrade to popcorn (1991) but this movie is much better, it not as cheesy as that movie.

This movie as some gory moment, all the deaths scenes were the same which was little disappointing and I also did not the like ending to movie.

Don't let the bad reviews scare you away from this one. It's actually a pretty good movie. The beginning starts as if it's really going to be bad but once you get into the middle of the movie, it turns out to be really good. Yes it's an indie film, now it may not have had a huge budget, but it's better than a lot of the crap I've seen out there. My son watched it with me and made fun of it up to about the 30 minute mark but then really got into and even started talking to the people in the movie. That's a sign he's actually paying attention. Like I said this is not a big budget Saw or Scream and doesn't really claim to be. And no, I'm in no way affiliated with the movie but I liked the movie for what it was. It was entertaining and at sometimes scary. Definitely not a waste of your time to see. Just make sure you sit through more than 30 to 45 minutes and give it a chance. It will probably surprise you...

It starts off with a killer escaping from a mental hospital when his horror movie is being shown. It cuts to five years later where a small theatre is showing it as a midnight movie. The killer's former doctor and a detective on the case show up thinking the killer will appear too. Then we get the stereotypes trotted out--the cute normal couple (Rebekah Brandes, Daniel Bonjour), the sexed up Italain guy and his date (Greg Circulnick, Mendell Maughan), the biker dude and HIS date (Stan Ellsworth, Melissa Steach), an annoying kid (Justin Baric) and the geek (Michael Schwartz). The movie begins and the killer has the ability to jump from the film to the theatre and starts killing people...and they're all trapped inside and can't get out.

The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense but the movie does deliver (somewhat). The idea itself is pretty cool and it actually started to spook me at the end when you realized the killer was going to pop up. Also the black and white movie within a movie here had some cute references to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The people here don't act like total idiots and some of them do pretty good despite their by-the-book characters. There's also some good acting by Bonjour, Cirulnick, Briddell and Swan. However the bad acting in this is just abominable--even worse than you expect from a low-budget horror flick! Brandes, Baric and Schwartz are just horrendous---and Brandes and Baric are two main characters! You could care less if they get killed or not. Also the killings are very bloody but the gore is ridiculously fake. It was so obvious you were looking at rubber it was almost laughable. So a good idea with some interesting characters are almost destroyed by terrible acting and dime store gore effects. I give it a 3.