In short: Against the Night (2017)

aka Amityville Prison (I have no idea)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the ending, so you don’t have to suffer through the movie!

One among a number of completely interchangeable young horror movie people – even their names seem to be chosen to be as generic as possible – who earns his money shooting fake ghost hunting stuff convinces his friends to go and visit an abandoned prison with him. After way too much time of all eight of these nonentities babbling over one another, they split up into smaller groups and get slaughtered, mostly off-camera. Stupid plot twists ensue. Your seasoned viewer of crap movies sighs in annoyance, then the most stupid plot twist of them all happens, and he does at least respect the film for really not having a single brain cell, yet also no shame.

So, if your dream movie is one that features all the problems of bad POV horror films, despite only half consisting of night vision shakycam etc, Brian Cavallaro’s Against the Night is probably an absolute dream come true. This thing features characterisation so thin it’s basically see-through, no personality to anyone on screen, a plot that starts about half an hour into the film, shots so dark you can’t see much even once there may actually be something happening on screen potentially worth seeing, and a story so generic and empty one might as well call it a parking lot instead of a story.

All of which, particularly with characters who barely manage to at least be horror film clichés, makes it rather difficult to care even once something does indeed start to happen. Sure, there’s a bit of violence, there’s some bickering, probably meant as dramatic tension and paranoia as imagined by someone who has no clue what these words mean, but there’s nobody and nothing on screen, neither person nor idea, that could actually give you a reason to care about any of it. Also, darkness, night vision and screaming does not automatically lead to atmosphere.


On the plus side, the final twist reveals that the killer is not as assumed some guy in a gasmask but an alien with face tentacles that maybe look a little like a gasmask when a film is lit quite as darkly as this one. Against the Night even plays fair and does present the alien explanation earlier, letting one character theorize aliens are haunting the prison and killing idiots with generic names because it is shaped like a crop circle.  This, ladies and gents, is the art of screenwriting.