BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

christopher-underwood Extremely low budget, which shows and can be off putting but this film moves with confidence. Scenes may be a little dark or slower than we would like and the dialogue somewhat less than snappy but we have a terrible feeling the tale that is told may not be too far off the mark. Filmed in the backwoods northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this is bleak looking country and pretty bleak people seem to lurk. There is gleeful and brutal killing for the sake of it and then as we proceed more serious devil worship based cult killing involving the kidnap of girls and their being held in cages awaiting their sacrifice. These later scenes are particularly well done and the lighting, dialogue and performances all seem to be upped a gear as we head to the ending with Lawrence Tierney lumbering across the screen to attempt an heroic rescue after all his own misdeeds.

Michael_Elliott Midnight (1982) BOMB (out of 4) John Russo will always be remembered for co-writing NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD with George Romero but Romero's career has been full of highs while Russo has never came close to recapturing the magic of that movie. MIDNIGHT is his attempt to enter the gory, slasher type cinema but the end result is just a horrid film with elements borrowed from THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and MOTHER'S DAY. A drunken cop (Lawrence Tierney) tries to molest his stepdaughter Nancy (Melanie Verlin) so she knocks him out with a radio. She then takes off hitchhiking when she's picked up by a couple guys (John Hall, Charles Jackson). The trio eventually stop in a small town where a group of rednecks are killing off people for Satan. MIDNIGHT is a low-budget movie that starts off laughably bad and just continues to get worse as it goes along. Being a low-budget movie should never be an excuse for bad filmmaking so I'm not going to cut this film any slack. Just check out the sequence where Tierney tries to come onto his daughter. The performances by the two are so bad that you can't help but laugh. Just check out when she hits her stepdad over the head with the radio. The slow motion effect is so laughable that you just know you're in trouble. The screenplay, from Russo adapted by his novel (WTF?) is really bad. Just check out the middle portion of the film with our trio. For one, they are told that this small town has had dozens of people murdered. For two, one of the guys is black and he's ran off by gunpoint by the locals. Third is the fact that the three rob a grocery store and have the police looking for them. With these three things happening the trio still decide to camp out? The story is a bore, the direction horrid and the performances are all pretty bad. Even Tom Savini's special effects are poor and without question the worst of his career. You can't blame Savini too much I guess since the budget is low. There are a few others credited with some of the effects so I wonder how much Savini actually is. Either way, this is a good candidate for one of the worst horror films of the decade.

acidburn-10 Plot = Nancy runs away from home after her stepfather tries to rape her. She hitch-hikes with two nice boys who are headed for Florida and they get along really well right from the start. However, Nancy will soon regret her decision to run away from home as a satanic family kidnaps her in order to sacrifice her to the devil.Midnight is a wannabe slasher from the early 80s but with more of a 70s feel due to the poor condition of the film and plus it's just another bad "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" clone. I read some mixed reviews about this flick, but I've read mixed reviews for other slasher movies before and I was pleased with some of them, unfortunately not in this case. Don't get me wrong the storyline sounded really good but once Nancy gets kidnapped the movie slows down and we are left with an unoriginal "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" rip off. The beginning of the movie was quite interesting and I was even willing to pass the terrible acting but when Nancy's friends gets killed off that's when the movie starts to go downhill.All in all "Midnight" is a really terrible backwoods slasher, the beginning showed potential but the last half is rushed so I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

Scarecrow-88 Backwoods hillbilly Satanists murder locals and capture a runaway after dispatching of the two "grocery thieves" she was hitching a ride with. The reason our heroine run away in the first place was because of her alcoholic policeman step-father's trying to molest her. The hillbillies include this portly cackling menace who murders a black priest with a knife and, shortly after, strangles and drowns the man's daughter in her own bathtub. Romero vet, John Amplas(the "vampire" star of Martin)has a creepy role as one of the Satanists who shoots two men in cold blood..one black man point-blank in the forehead. The runaway is Nancy(Melanie Verlin)and her step-father, Bert Johnson, is played by the great Lawrence Tierney. An odd occurrence takes place in this film..Bert, the man who is quite a liar(he tells his wife, in a subtle way of course, that Nancy was trying to seduce him, for petesake), becomes the hero of this flick! He, through fine police work, will find Nancy's recent whereabouts and face-off with the Satanists in a bloody finale.This is a film from author of "Night of the Living Dead" John Russo, who I guess wanted to make his way into the horror genre. I've read that many feel Russo, at the very least, captures the aesthetic of Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." As I watched it again for the second time, it feels more akin to Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left." That feeling of hopelessness for several female sacrifices to Satan and how the villains have no regard for the human lives they destroy(in the backwoods where even the local police are afraid to enter)certainly reminded me of Craven's film. "Midnight" also felt as raw, sick, and exploitive(except for the lack of rape and nudity)as "Last House on the Left." And, also, the acting is about as lacking as Craven's film. In my mind, "Midnight" is about as backwoods and independent a horror picture as can be made. When someone mentions "Backwoods slasher", "Midnight" will probably stem to my mind for now on. One thing I can say positive about this is Russo's choice of location as the setting..the cold dead woods lend to the feeling of dread and there's a garbage-beauty this film has I came away with liking. It's the acting that causes me to ache. That and the CORNY theme song..the type you would find on a record titled, "AM GOLD". Damn thing is that title tune gets stuck in your head..to the point you'll just be chiming away realizing in horror what you humming to.I'm guessing that the reason the acting is less than stellar is because Russo uses local talent, shoots his film in local areas, and shoots as low-income as possible. I guess it could be viewed as a grindhouse flick. It looked like one to me. Most of the violence is blood splatter as large blades slash across throats.