Diary entries forAfter Midnight
After Midnight
how was he not fired and arrested after pulling that stunt story 1 was fine story 2 those girls were so dumb story 3 why did she not call 911 the moment it was made clear the stalker was in the woman's house? the ending tried to do something interesting but...
After Midnight
Jim Wheat (https://boxd.it/2GKL), Ken Wheat (https://boxd.it/2GKV)• 1989 • Horror(?) A generally dull and not particularly scary horror anthology film, After Midnight’s saving grace is really just Ramy Zada’s hilariously unhinged Professor Edward Derek, who’s new class, “The Psychology of Fear” acts as the film’s narrative framing device to deliver the most unintentionally funny scary stories ever. The acting is…passable, for the most part. The film looks pretty good, which isn’t exactly very surprising as it’s DP was Phedon Papamichael (3:10 to Yuma, Nebraska). It’s just quite a slog, really. The first story, The Old Dark House, centers around Joan (Nadine van der Velde) and Kevin (Marc McClure), a couple celebrating Kevin’s birthday. Joan insists on going on a midnight drive and after Kevin’s tires go flat, she suggests going into an abandoned mansion to look for a phone (okay?). Of course, it’s all a prank to give Kevin a surprise party (except I don’t think Kevin would have liked the part of them purposefully flattening his tires, but that’s just me) — one thing leads to another and Kevin accidentally kills Joan with a sword while she was dressed up as a knife wielding maniac. Spooky. The second story, A Night On the Town (the titles are directly from Wikipedia, by the way), follows a group of girl friends out at night looking to have some fun. They stop by a very, VERY sketchy gas station and decide to just…go on in, I guess. There’s a crazy rapist with three blood thirsty (they actually look like the nicest doggos) dogs that holds them up at knife point. They escape, get in the car, crash it immediately, killing the man. They are then pursued by the three dogs — one of the girls, for some reason, gets out of the car to try and run away and gets mauled to death — and end up having to lure the dogs into a warehouse and blow it the fuck up, lmao. The third story, All Night Operator, is probably the most boring one. A late night telephone operator starts getting calls from a creepy killer that starts to…well…kill people. It’s super cheesy and ends with the whole “he’s right behind me, isn’t he?” thing. Terrible. The funniest thing to me is every time one of the characters finishes telling their story, everyone says something like “wow, that was the scariest thing EVER. I will never be able to sleep again”, like, huh? Anyways, the movie ends with one of the students that hates the Professor breaking in to his house and trying to kill him, but Professor Edward kills him instead, gets set on fire (typical Friday night), and becomes an Army of Darknessskeleton or something. It then confirms the whole movie was a dream from the main character before her first day in the Professor’s class. I’m also just realizing I didn’t talk about my favorite part of this — this “Professor” starts his lecture about fear by pulling out a gun and pointing it at a students head (the one that tries to kill him) and is then surprised when he gets in trouble for it. The most ridiculous aspect of this is when he tells his students that they can come to his house for the lectures, but they won’t be graded or anything — no one in hell would ever do that, but whatever. Watched for the Collab. (https://boxd.it/bciZ6)
