In short: Midnight 2 (1993)

Abraham Barnes (Matthew Jason Walsh), the youngest member of the Satanist serial killer family we saw in Midnight, has somehow survived the events of the first film. He has changed his personal style from "country bumpkin" to "insanely annoying guy with a video camera" and is using said camera and a bunch of horrible pick-up lines that would get people much more attractive than he is punched in the face to finagle women into his house.

Theoretically, he is on the look-out for the one special woman to bear his children and clean up his act (and kitchen), but in practice he's more about killing the women who don't stand up to his standards (aka every woman). Exciting times lie ahead when he murders the friend of Rebecca (Jo Narcia). She has seen him and his camera and uses her script-derived charm to talk a cop (Chuck Pierce) into helping her investigate Abraham.

If I can believe the Internet, then John (A.) Russo's belated nominal sequel to his Midnight has "been sold both individually and as part of a "Young Filmmaker's Career-Starting Package" along with John A. Russo's book Cheap Thrills, legal forms, and the four volume videotape set "John Russo's Filmmaking Seminar"". It' was probably included as an example of how crappy a film can get, with big red warning signs reading "Don't do it this way!".

While the first Midnight sure had its share of problems, it was at least an honest effort at filmmaking on a budget. This shot on video sequel is just a lazy bunch of nothing, padded out with about ten minutes of footage from the first film. Those ten minutes are the best that's on offer here, really, the rest is sub-porn acting, painfully bad dialogue, cramped sets and the neverending monologizing of the insufferable Walsh. His performance, consisting mostly of mumbling and sounding like a badly behaved child, just screams for a very special award as the worst acted psycho I have ever seen on film or video. I hope he is proud.

Technically, it's all catastrophe all the time - the interiors are somebody's hobby cellar, the camera just points vaguely into the direction of the "actors", not even the synthie soundtrack (which sounds very very familiar) is any good.

Usually, I try (try is the important word here) not to take bad films personally, and this even is the sort of film whose ineptness might be somewhat endearing coming from someone with no prior filmmaking experience, but from an old pro like Russo, Midnight 2 amounts to the director suddenly appearing smirking in your living room and screaming "fuck you!" right into your face.

So, unless you just need to hear what Abe does with his throbbing hot camera, you'll be better off watching a Polonia Brothers movie. Those guys at least don't hate the people watching their films.

 

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In short: Midnight (1982)

aka Backwoods Massacre

Doubting Catholic schoolgirl Nancy (Melanie Verlin) runs away from home after her alcoholic cop stepfather (Lawrence Tierney following the smell of an alcohol providing paycheck, no doubt), tries to rape her.

She falls in with two poor college boys (Charles Jackson & Tom Hall) on their way to Florida. And these guys truly are poor. Their money is just enough for keeping their car in gas, but to acquire food, they are stealing from small grocery stores along the way, a tactic which could bring a mixed-race buddy pair into more trouble than would be appropriate in the middle of Rednecklandia.

Doing this with their under-aged guest and in an area from which the soon to be deceased Reverend Exposition (Bob Johnson) tried to warn them away isn't exactly going to improve their survivability. As it turns out, a hasty retreat from the police only leads the trio into the clutches of a family of backwoods satanists trying to resurrect their mum through female sacrifices.

Nancy's the lucky one of the three, with a nice direct line to a white-bearded lady above (I do understand the concept of prayer right, I hope?) and a drunk stepfather with a guilty conscience on her trail.

John Russo's Pittsburgh based Midnight is a more interesting film than I had suspected. Russo's script tries its hardest to enrich the backwoods slasher genre thematically by giving it a slight social realist bend. It mostly does this by adding a more complex background to the victims than is common and by first placing them in the way of horrifying real world danger and confronting them - unsubtly, it has to be said - with things like casual racism and poverty. Of course (keeping Russo's background as scriptwriter of Night of the Living Dead in mind this should come as no surprise) there's also a healthy distrust of authority figures in there.

Unfortunately, Midnight is not as successful as it is interesting. As a horror film, it lacks in emotional impact. It goes through all the motions of classic backwoods slasher films, but is seldom convincingly nasty or brutal.

The death scene of our two male college kids being executed by two of our backwoods maniacs dressed up as cops is the only true exception to this. The very casual violence committed by cruel people in uniform resonates, but also makes a promise the rest of the film isn't willing or able to deliver on. What follows is mostly genre-standard, just less gory and hampered by Russo's awkward and stiff staging of violence.

Most disappointing is that Russo doesn't integrate the themes he has brought up earlier into the slasher business. As soon as the usual mad killer stuff starts, everything else is forgotten.

But at least it is a film with a few ambitions.

 

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