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.
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.