What was your first “Midnight Movie”? Was it THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW with a group of your buddies on a Friday Night? It was for me. It probably was for many of you. After all it’s the quintessential cult film. But Co-Writer and Director Jack Messitt has another kind of Midnight Movie in mind for you all. And his movie is a killer!

A group of friends gather together for a late night screening of an obscure 1970’s horror film titled The Dark Beneath. The film hasn’t been screened in 5-years. In fact the last time it played was in a mental institution where the director has been captive for decades. The result? A bloodbath with nearly 70 people dead or missing—including the infamous director. Now the film is about to play once more and this time the audience is about to discover just what happened that fateful night in the psych-ward.

Kind of a cross between the 1991 film POPCORN and Woody Allen’s PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, MIDNIGHT MOVIE proposes the question what if a cinematic serial killer could come off the screen and kill the audience watching the film. Surely, a quandary of Brechtian proportions but, unfortunately, it’s played out inside standard slasher movie parameters. Simply put, the film sets up its teenage victims in ten little Indians fashion before executing them in a succinct series of uninspired deaths. The concept is there but the execution is lacking. And the most pronounced flaw in that execution is the killer.

Dressed in a pair of baggy overalls and sporting a half-skull face mask that (periodically) mismatches itself (they must have had more than one mask). Out killer murders his victims with what appears to be an oversized conical drill bit fixed to a handgrip. He uses this device—that we often see him sharpening—to essentially gore huge divots of flesh from his victim’s torsos (and in one of the more spectacular deaths…through one dude’s eye). It’s not completely clear that this method of execution is absolutely lethal but it certainly causes a series of flesh wounds that might make The Black Knight even wince a bit. The problem is that it gets real old, real quick and when the silent killer actually mixes it up a bit by channeling a few thousand volts of electricity through one dumb teen, it feels like the filmmakers thought that too. But, despite the jolting death sequence (yea…a pun was intended) it’s soon back to the old grab and stab that we see at least a half-dozen other times in the film. Don’t get me wrong. The blood work and effects are solid stuff but once you’ve seen the masked killer whack a few theater patrons you know what you’re gonna get the next time he pops off the screen.

As far as the look and feel of the film goes, this is some top-notch low budget filmmaking. The set design of the old theater is interesting and the film shifts perspective around the location to avoid stagnation. It also moves from reality to the alternate universe of the midnight movie, a change that might have been a bit more effective if the movie in question—which is supposed to be a low-budget feature that’s 40-years old—looked more like an authentic relic of the period (for tips on what that should look like check out the 2005 retro-horror flick SLAUGTERHOUSE OF THE RISING SUN). Still, despite the relative newness, efforts have been made to age the film (added grain and lines and dirt are all the rage now). Still, the changes in scenery do give MIDNIGHT MOVIE a greater sense of scope—something so many other low budget films are sorely lacking.

MIDNIGHT MOVIE has potential to spare in spite of its relatively derivative subject matter. It’s a slasher film with a supernatural twist. The film never bothers to explain the how and why of the killer’s abilities which actually works to its advantage here. We don’t need to know why and how, we just accept it as fact. I mean, we accept Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers as fact despite every rational reason not to. In this respect we accept the killer of MIDNIGHT MOVIE as well. Unfortunately, unlike those three splatter film icons mentioned above, the killer in this film lacks personality. And like Samuel L. Jackson once said, “Personality goes a long way”.