Midnight (1982)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: A family of Satan worshippers who I assume are inbred because they live in a rural area try to reenact scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to middling results. 

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• So if you leave the options screen of the DVD on for too long it shows scenes that spoil the entire flippin’ movie.
• The opening credits seem to want to be Texas Chainsaw Massacre but instead of a cemetery it’s just sticks in the ground. STICKS!!
• A little girl’s leg is caught in a bear trap. Her screams are as convincing as when my wife says she enjoys spending time with me.
• A nutty family, I assume inbred, finds the girl and assumes she’s a demon. I’m with them, you really never can tell.
• Satanic ritual with the dead girl’s body at MIDNIGHT!!!
• Wait I don’t understand, they’re fearful of demons but they worship Satan? Wouldn’t that be like Christians being fearful of angels?
• Special Makeup Effects by Tom Savini!!! Which is funny because this movie was made after Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, and The Burning, in which effort was put forth by the rest of the film crew.
• This Catholic confession is scarier than the satanic ritual.
• Lawrence Tierney!!!! As a creepy policeman stepfather!!!! The role he was born to play!!!!
• I honestly don’t think Lawrence Tierney’s drunken lecherous behavior is in the script.
• So our protagonist, Nancy Johnson, bonks Lawrence Tierney over the head with a portable radio with all the force of a firefly taking a piss. Then she splits.
  
  

  Gimme head ’til I’m dead!

• She’s going to California with an aching in her heart, so she hitches a ride in a van with shag carpeting on the inside piloted by one white guy and one black guy. Vegas has pulled the bet of which of them will die first off the board. You’d also logically assume that there will be a gang bang, but the black guy seems to hate Nancy for some reason.
• Haha! Now Larry T. is trying to convince Nancy’s mom that Nancy has been seducing him! Who could resist that sexual stallion?
• Nancy’s mom is a fucking dope.
• Ok, lot of dialogue not enough devilogue.
• The music for this flick must be from a porno that was canceled because the set was haunted by a ghost made of tears and semen.
• Almost as many van driving scenes in this as Rock n Roll Nightmare.
• I’m amazed and saddened that there’s no “Gas, grass, or ass” bumper sticker on this van.
• The gang give a lift to a black preacher and his black daughter. Now there’s no telling who’s gonna die first!
• One of the inbred cultists is trying to sneak up on the preacher in the cemetery, but he’s so fat you’d hear his thunderous lumbering from miles away. He’s so fat his footprints fill with nacho cheese.
• So the black preacher dies first. 1/5 odds.
• The gang is talking about how the two guys, Tom and Hank (Tom Hanks!), don’t have enough money for both gas and food for their carpeted van trip from Pennsylvania to Florida so they’ve been stealing groceries. Maybe don’t embark on a trip if you’re that broke. Nancy has $14. Maybe they should stop somewhere and find work.
• The preacher’s daughter basically gets waterboarded to death in her bathtub.
• Oh here’s a scene of the gang stealing groceries. Why is this necessary whatsoever? What happened to that satanic cult family story? This movie will have more to do with Satan if they steal a box of Devil Dogs.
• So Pennsylvania to Florida is probably a 16-hour or so trip. How much fucking groceries do they need to steal for two-thirds of a day? They couldn’t have scraped up enough dough for beef jerky and potato chips?
• So this movie just went off the rails and skidded into Boredom Town.
• What the fuck does any of this have to do with 12 a.m.
• So two crazed cops murder Tom and Hank, insisting that they killed the preacher’s daughter. I assume they’re members of the inbred cult family. Or they’re regular cops from 2016 because Hank was black, after all.
• Nancy runs off to a dilapidated house. Where have I seen this before??
• This has basically become a high school play production of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• Nancy gets locked in a dog cage next to another woman. Then the inbred satanic cult daughter (who turned out to be smoking hot) tells them they’ll be part of a ritual Friday at midnight. Nowwwwww I see.
  
  
• The inbred satanic cult mother is a rotting corpse in a rocking chair. 100% did not see that coming at all. AT ALL!
• 45-minute scene of two teens playing frisbee. Is the frisbee satanic? Possibly. I was a little confused why the frisbee kept getting bigger and bigger as it flew through the air, then it hit me. If only the frisbee had razor blades in it.
  
  
• I also had a pretty good joke about boomerangs, but I forgot it. Oh well, it’ll come back to me.
• The inbred satanic cult is now using the carpeted van to kidnap broads, which was its destiny all along.
• Lawrence Tierney is trying to track Nancy down. That’s literally impossible. But he’s so drunk he doesn’t give a fuck, fuck it. He’ll move on when he feels like it.
  
  
• Lawrence Tierney is going to end up being the hero to the rescue here and that is just phenomenal.
• IT’S MIIIIIIIIIIIIIDNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!!!
• Man, satanic rituals are as boring as regular church. I assume.
• The carpeted van pulls right in front of Lawrence Tierney on a deserted stretch of backcountry road. What a stroke of luck.
• Satanic story short, LT goes to the house just before Nancy is the next to be sacrificed. Together they kill the inbred satanic cult family but not before Larry takes a knife in the gut, which was his destiny all along.

Scare Level: [POST PICTURE OF LAWRENCE TIERNEY’S FACE HERE – ed.]

Gore Level: Besides the presence of sexual dynamo Lawrence Tierney, gore is the one thing this picture has going for it. I imagine this was made on a shoestring budget and the shoestrings were made out of used fishing line covered in bird shit, so Tom Savini worked his magic the best he could.

Nudity Level: Lawrence Tierney just stands in the middle of a hallway for 20 minutes wearing absolutely nothing except one of those drinking helmets that had a bottle of whiskey on one side and a bottle of formaldehyde on the other.The scene didn’t end until he’d emptied both bottles, and it’s haunted my dreams each night since.

Best Line: “You’re on your own, you’re all alone, and midnight’s at your door” – That’s technically Best Lyric from the Theme Song, which is a very on-the-nose depiction of the events in the movie, but even though the film is about a murderous satanic cult, the song is done in an odd early ’80s folk rock style. But it matches the rest of the music in the movie because it sounds like it should be playing over the “climax” of a lousy porno. Possibly starring Lawrence Tierney. Definitely starring Lawrence Tierney. 

Best Scene: I’ve talked about Lawrence Tierney’s sexual advances on his stepdaughter enough. Wait, no I have not. The decapitations were also nice.

Gimme head ’til I’m dead!

Worst Scene: Probably a tie between the never ending scenes of Nancy and the boys riding in the van and them shoplifting groceries, which made no sense and went absolutely nowhere.

Level of Hell: This was pretty bad, but not enough to make me hate it, and LT saved it for the most part.

Overall: Not a great movie, but… not a great movie. It’s funny, apparently the mastermind behind this co-wrote Night of the Living Dead, which must have exhausted all of his talents. It’s pretty lousy, but you don’t have that horrible feeling keeping you up around midnight that you completely wasted your time. It’s just nothing you haven’t seen in a backwoods murder cult family picture before. Totally uncreative. If you aren’t as enraptured by Lawrence Tierney’s presence as I was, you’ll probably just want to skip it altogether.

Score: 3.5 Sips from Lawrence Tierney’s Flask (out of 10)