Mondo Celluloid - Review » MIDNIGHT MOVIE

MIDNIGHT MOVIE

It’s a testament to the state of studio horror films, or perhaps to the spirit of independent filmmaking, that the three best horror films I’ve seen this year - the brilliant vampire drama Let the Right One In, the surprisingly hilarious dark comedy Otis, and yes, Eben McGarr’s fantastic Sick Girl - were low-budget, scarcely-marketed gems that struggled through the film festival circuit while uninspired dreck like this year’s Prom Night remake got the full studio rollout and made over $50M worldwide. Lately I’ve been making a strong effort to catch those “smaller” genre films that would otherwise slip under the radar, forgoing bigger releases like Saw V (which I really should see and review, in all fairness to the efforts of horror filmmakers funded and unfunded) and attending the sort of festivals and screening series that offer works that otherwise go unseen (credit Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors for introducing me to Otis).

Jack Messitt’s Midnight Movie is just one of those sorts of little-movies-that-could - a fun and inventive slasher flick rich in gore and light on the sort of needless exposition that gave 2005’s House of Wax remake a 113-minute running time. The hit of this year’s Chicago Horror Film Festival, where it picked up both the Best Feature Film and Best Cinematography awards - shot by Ruben Russ and Clyde W. Smith, the film has a great, glossy look, and some well-orchestrated surreal imagery and extreme angle choices that suggest much more consideration to mood and effect than is found in most independent slasher flicks - Midnight Movie seems comfortable being both a somewhat campy teens-in-peril gorefest, and an inventive and well-staged game of supernatural cat-and-mouse.

A sort of Purple Rose of Cairo meets The Ring - with perhaps intentional nods to one of my favorite unsung 90’s horror classics, Popcorn - Midnight Movie is essentially about a small town theatre that decides to screen a rarely seen and controversial horror film, a 1970’s indie called The Dark Beneath, as a midnight flick. What they don’t know is that the celluloid print is haunted, and soon the film’s killer (a Leatherface-type with an inventive tool that literally drills a hole into his victims and shucks out their organs) is leaping off the screen and hunting down the theatergoers, now stuck in the theatre, one by one.

Our killer is not a character prone to witty pre-dispatch one-liners and a various assortment of increasingly horrific tools - like Michael Myers or Leatherface, he’s got little to say and sticks to his tried-and-true weapon of choice, letting his mere presence and the inventive work of the director and cinematographers provide the terror for him. Because his is a surreal, otherworldly character, he appears and disappears throughout the surroundings, allowing for quite a few jolts and scares. He’s a fun and creepy killer to add to the canon of film slasher icons - now if only they’d given him a clever name…

Midnight Movie does not have any more Los Angeles screenings scheduled in the near future, but click here for a list of scheduled screenings in other cities across the country.