1982′s MIDNIGHT has serious old skool potential…but lacks crucial 1980s cred

I don’t remember adding the1982 film Midnight to my collection…but there it was as I continue my A to Z rewatch of all my horror DVDs, so I popped it in not recalling anything about it until as soon as it started. I assume I purchased it after seeing it mentioned as a film from 1982 on a message board. Since it is horror and came from the 80s, I’m obligated to own it. Yes, obligated. It’s a rule of living in the Dan Zone. I’m just shocked that I absolutely never saw this movie before I bought it on DVD. It must have been like the one 80s horror movie that we didn’t carry in the video store I worked at in the 80s.

Getting the important horror trivia out of the way, this film is written and directed by John Russo, the man responsible for writing the original Night of the Living Dead. When the film begins, it seems like it’s going to be a real bad low-budget flick but once it gets off the ground (and that takes a while), there are actually some great horror elements.

The film has a ‘prologue’ involving a mother and her children catching a little girl in an animal trap in a field, beating her and then taking her home to sacrifice her. When the little girl is sitting with her leg in the animal trap, she sounds and looks like she was directed to merely scream—without any direction as to the kind of pain and terror she would be in if she was actually caught in an animal trap. Not a good sign.

It only gets worse when we flash forward and meet Nancy, a tomboyish looking chick who somehow ends up being the objective of every man’s ‘affection’ in this movie. First thing, her drunk old stepfather cop comes home and tries to molest her, so she hits him over the head with a tape recorder (totally 80s!) and runs away, leaving him passed out on her bed and…snoring. I kid not.

Once she takes to the streets, she’s immediately offered a ride…in exchange for sex…by some perv in a car. She gets rid of him and is then picked up by a couple of buddies in a truck, a black dude and a white dude (who is hot for her—but she’s not hot! I don’t get it!!!). As they drive off, things go really downhill and make me pretty sure this film was filmed in the 70s but not released until 82. We are treated to a melodramatic, soft rock track by a female singer, with the main lyrics being “you’re on your own.” Wow, this is bad.

Meanwhile, back home, stepdad cop is telling his wife that her daughter ran off and that Nancy has been trying to seduce him! What a disgusting pig!

But back to more of “You’re on your own” as the truck trio makes its way through a small town. At a gas station, they meet a black reverend and his daughter who tell them there have been a lot of murders in the town over the past few years that the locals are calling ‘accidental deaths’ because they are a bunch of racists. Wow. Didn’t see the racism angle coming. Anyway, the reverend and daughter hitch a ride in their truck and are dropped off at a cemetery to pay respects to the reverend’s dead wife. The daughter decides to walk home (home seems to be pretty close to the cemetery), and once she’s gone, this bearded fat guy in overalls comes out of the woods with a knife and kills the reverend! Soon, the fat guy is at the reverend’s house, and things don’t turn out so well for the reverend’s daughter.

Meanwhile, our interracial, intergender trio is facing their own harassment by the locals (they’re run out of a bar for having a black dude with them), and the black dude even drops the ‘honky’ bomb after. Awesome! TOTALLY 80s! Right after, the guys inform Nancy that they’ve been stealing food from convenience stores as they travel because they have no money, so she joins in and they steal from another place…to the  mellow 70s sounds of “You’re on your own”! TOO funny.

But this is finally where the real horror begins and we are treated to a backwoods family film that’s half Texas Chainsaw Massacre, half Psycho. After an all-points bulletin is put out for our trio, they are chased by cops and of course make a ‘wrong turn’ into the woods to escape. They soon see the fat killer running around with what looks like a body in the woods. But it wouldn’t be an 80s horror movie if they didn’t decide to camp out in the woods anyway. And if Nancy didn’t decide to take a walk by herself the next morning before the guys awake.

Well, Nancy returns to camp to find that two ‘policemen’ have found her male companions. One creepy guy is a totally androgynous dude (at first I thought it was a woman) and the other is this bulky, bald, goateed leather daddy type! WTF? It’s like something out of a Mapplethorpe photo.

Unfortunately, things don’t go well for Nancy’s friends, and within minutes she’s on her own (the ‘racism’ theme discarded and rendered completely irrelevant for the remainder of the film), running through the woods being chased by the creepy pair and, naturally, right into their sadistic home. This is when it gets really good. Nancy is directed by a nice girl playing solitaire at a table to a phone in another room. Unfortunately, when she goes in that room, she finds the fat killer cutting off some dude’s head with a knife! Within minutes she’s at the mercy of the ‘family’—the two guys in the cop uniforms (which it turns out they got when they killed some real cops), the fat guy, and the solitaire playing be-otch. They make Nancy walk on all fours like a dog into a cage next to some other already caged girl! I was sure this was about to turn into a seriously disturbing exploitation flick, but that never happens.

Instead, it turns out the dirty stepdaddy decides to go find his wife’s daughter and make amends, so he follows clues all the way to the crazy family’s house!!!

While stepdaddy is playing hero and sneaking up for his rescue mission, we get to meet the family’s mommy—a corpse sitting in a rocking chair upstairs. Seems the family needs the blood of three people to perform an Easter ritual at midnight. They hook themselves up with another female victim, who is the first to be sacrificed at an old skool occult ritual including a classic black room with candles, the family in black robes with hoods, inverted pentagrams painted on their foreheads, and dear old dead mom watching the whole ceremony.

Nancy is the star, so she ends up being the lone survivor (stepdad gets killed trying to save her, but we don’t exactly feel sympathy for him, even though he was drunk when he tried to screw her). Nancy takes care of business, knocking off the family one member at a time, and as soon as she sets the last one on fire, the credits begin to roll to the sound of… “You’re on your own”! Didn’t anyone tell John Russo that classics like Night of the Living Dead were classics in part because of their appropriate musical scores???

As cheesy as Midnight is (the word is actually a lyric in “You’re on your own”), it has some really strong horror moments that make it totally worth a watch. Like I said, it feels more 70s than 80s, so I can’t say it gets points for coming from the 80s. And here’s the real kick. I just discovered that Russo did a sequel in 1993 in which one member of the family didn’t exactly die at the hands of Nancy… I MUST see this movie!!!!