Night (1996)

A group of fearless yet not terribly competent vampire hunters go up against an undead 1930s gangster (Richard Cutler), mostly for personal reasons. It doesn’t go terribly well for our heroes, until the lead vampire is killed in the most ignominious way since that thing with Dracula and the bush nobody likes to talk about.

Directed, written, shot, produced by Glenn Andreiev, who is also co-starring as the film’s Renfield, Night is one of the more interesting shot on video movies of its era. It does, of course, have many of the problems we’re used to from this sort of thing, so the acting is of varying degrees of badness, the sound and sound editing are sometimes dubious, and the script is not exactly professional. Furthermore, the editing – and really, all technical aspects of the film – isn’t just rough around the edges but also around the middle, turning the action sequences more into anti-action sequences. The film’s general look is SOV-typical, which is to say, mostly ugly.

However, if you can cope with all that – and if you want to approach 90s SOV horror, you simply need to or might just as well give up on the project altogether – Night has actually quite a few things to recommend it. While the plotting isn’t up to any professional standards, the film does understand that it is best to drop most of the exposition and explanations and drop the audience in medias res into the vampire plot, starting things up at a point in the narrative when things are actually beginning to happen, and never letting up showing something of interest or fun to the audience with every scene. Scenes are generally as long or short as they need to be (though the transitions to the next are botched more often than not), and there’s none of the pointlessly meandering quality you often get in these films. Andreiev, it appears, knows what he wants and even mostly how to get there, and isn’t terribly interested in the in-between, which is a particular virtue in a realm of filmmaking where there’s neither money nor space for that in-between anyway.

The film’s other big strength is its often surprisingly fun imagination, coming up with interesting and weird details that can make parts of the film actually memorable. The vampire as an old school gangster angle for example is pretty wonderful, the old undead now using the power of crack cocaine to control people to do his bidding by day, clearly reliving his glory days. It also provides opportunity for some really terrible “I’m a junkie” acting.

I also can’t help but admire a filmmaker for casting himself as a semi-comical turncoat and Renfield-type character who always misses out on being on time for his evil deeds because he’s perpetually distracted by videos catering to his very particular kinks. Also appearing in the film’s gallery of weird character ideas are a bare-chested bodybuilder vampire (who really needs quite some killing), a random guy (billed as the “Balloonatic” in the credits) who drives around in a car full of balloons to cope with his anxiety (spoiler: balloons are no help against vampires), and a handful of very awkward but also absurdly enthusiastically acted fight scenes.

While all of this has the patented SOV “like crap” look, there’s often surprisingly effective blocking, Andreiev making more use of the (small) possibilities of video than you’d expect, at least here.

Obviously, all of this won’t make Night a good film in most viewers’ books, but to my eyes, it’s fun, sometimes pleasantly imaginative and never boring, really rather exceeding the tiny hopes I usually have for SOV material.