Rating: 0
Starring: James F. Moore, Wes Olsen, Sandy Schimmel
It's movies like this that makes me wonder how a company like Troma gathered such a big fan following.
An implied "brutal" murder of a teenage girl had police chief Cooper (James F. Moore) asking the local mayor Reilly (Dave Bowling) into hiring some extra help. The thing about the mayor, however, is that he doesn't want to make this murder anymore bigger as it is right now since he has plans on bringing a university to town and the last thing he needs is bad publicity.
Of course, Cooper disregards his mayor's wishes and hires young detective Brock Johnson (Wes Olsen) to help him catch a killer so threatening that he can dismember people with just his bare hands. (I nod my head in false excitement) As the duo investigates who's behind the increasing bodycount, things are further complicated when Cooper's own daughter Jan (Sandy Schimmel) takes an immediate liking for Johnson and the killer (simply dubbed as The Creeper) starts to slowly makes his way to the two men to kill off the only people hindering him from his killing spree.
As much as I wanted to be excited for all of this, The Dark Side of Midnight is anything but exciting; apart from nearly every bloke here sporting a mustache and how most of the writing were just atrociously laughable, there's nothing remotely fun, scary, intense, and/or overall worthwhile about this movie. The actors looked like they came straight out of a local community theater and the meager budget of $10,000 (apparently was straight out of the director-slash-writer-slash-actor Wes Olsen's pockets) meant not only are we going to get amateurish camera work and lighting, but it also meant that the only gore this supposed slasher film is going to offer is one dead kid's sliced throat. (And it wasn't even a decent looking throat cut, mind you! Looked more like some wood putty dabbed with red paint and hastily placed over the child actor's neck with white school glue.) The rest of the killings either occurred offcamera or were standardized stranglings, placed far apart between copious amount of expositions and repetitive dialogues, sadistically torturing anybody foolish enough to sit through this dreck thinking they hit a gold mine of the so-bad-its-good type. I think I recall falling asleep a total of three to two times during my attempts to watch this in one sitting and I vaguely remember putting on a better movie right after Midnight ended coz I really really don't want to end that night with this bullshivism!
For some people, this might be a charming little number straight out of the bowels of bad cinema that they can laugh at, but for the many of us with half a working brain, The Dark Side of Midnight is lower than protozoic waste. In fact, if we ever get invaded by aliens or face the sudden arrival of giant monsters straight out of some freaky dimension, I can bet my arse that arsenals filled with copies of this film will have the same devastating killing power as, oh I dunno, 10 million tons of TNT. It is that bad.Bodycount:
1 female murdered offcamera
1 boy found with his throat cut
1 female garroted
1 female murdered offcamera
1 female strangled to death
1 male immolated in explosion
Total: 6
It's the films that Troma themselves make that people are fans of. The ones that they merely distribute (like this) are almost all regarded as crap, with a couple of exceptions like Combat Shock or Blood Sucking Freaks.
ReplyDeleteCombat Shock was good. Can't say the same for Blood Sucking Freaks, though...
DeleteOh yeah, it's definitely divisive, to put it mildly. I don't think there's any middle ground at all with it, at least not from what I've seen.
DeleteAnd thus continue my "love-hate relationship" with Troma and their fans!
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