User Reviews

The Dead of Night starts as a mental patient named Gerald (Rizzo) escapes from the (not very) 'secure' Hospital that he currently resides in... Everyday American teenager Mel (Cameron Zeidler) is the new kid at high school, the resident bully Darryl (Jon Thomasolson) & his gang, Keith (Richard Finley), Jim (Brian Crowe), Suzanne (Karrie MacLaine), Nancy (Tara Taylor) & Bev (Katie Swain) are beating up a geek name Carl (Tom Brennan) & Mel comes to his rescue. Eventually everyone shakes hands & Darryl ask Mel & Carl to a late night party at the local cemetery which they agree to go to. That night Carl & his fellow geek Howard (Pat Pinson) show up at the cemetery & sine Darryl is a real a-hole he & his mates tie Carl & Howard up, throw them into an open grave & half bury them. Suzanne gets cold feet & leaves, Carl & Howard manage to climb out of the grave but are attacked by some sort of demon creature. Bev suddenly realises that she has left her purse behind & as she goes back to get it she too is attacked by the creature. Next day at school & Carl, Howard & Bev are all acting very strangely, they walk around like mindless zombies & drool a lot. Darryl is convinced that Carl & Howard have done something to Bev & after school he plans to teach them a lesson, unfortunately as the sun goes down & day turns to night Carl, Howard & Bev all turn into demon like creatures who intend to turn everyone at school into creatures such as themselves! Scary eh?

Wrtten, produced & directed by Tom Duncan (the IMDb lists three director's but the version I saw credited only Duncan) I thought The Dead of Night was absolute crap, this is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff & it deserves all the bad reviews, comments & it's low IMDb user rating score. The script by Duncan is awful, the character's are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is terrible, there's no decent horror or action, it's incredibly slow & boring & nothing makes any sort of sense. What on Earth does Gerald the guy who escapes from the Hospital have to do with anything? If he was one of the creatures why didn't he turn his fellow patients & the doctors in creatures, if he was turned into one at the graveyard why could he control his transformation & not turn into one during the night? Nothing comes together at all, there's no story, the scariest thing Carl, Howard & Bev do is walk down school corridors & that's it until they tun into creatures at the end. The creatures are not given any sort of story or explanation, we don't know what they are, what they want or where they came from. The Dead of Night is one of those truly terrible films which you have to experience to appreciate just how bad it is, words cannot do it justice. Just think about the worst film you have ever seen & The Dead of Night is petty much as bad if not worse.

Director Duncan does his best to make this piece of crap even worse to sit through as he uses some really annoying techniques including making the entire screen blur & go fuzzy whenever one of the creatures is around, there's the usual slow motion, he skip frames during certain scene to give it a jerky look & then there's the whole shaky hand-held camera thing going on which just about confirms that The Dead of Night is both conceptually & technically rubbish. There's no atmosphere, there's no scares, no gore & the entire school population consists of about 6 students. At the very end the hero Mel defeats the creatures by simply opening a door & letting the sunlight in, wow now that's exciting stuff & that's as exciting as The Dead of Night gets which says everything.

The film is really cheap & nasty, there's no style or flair & as a whole it's as entertaining watching pint dry, no actually it's less entertaining than watching paint dry. The acting was awful from the usual bland annoying American teenage cast.

The Dead of Night is really, really bad. It has zero entertainment value & is as bad as everyone who've seen it says it is, it's as simple & straight forward as that. Definitely one to avoid, trust me you'll be glad you did.

A group of teenagers hold a party in a cemetery. Several of the teens transform into evil and ugly demonic creatures after they are attacked by a hideous monster in said cemetery. The possessed kids go after the other teens who are still normal. Will any of them manage to remain human? Boy, does this simply horrendous clunker miss the mark in every possible way: For starters, writer/director Tom Duncan crucially fails to bring a single iota of tension or creepy atmosphere to the premise. Worse yet, Duncan not only makes annoying use of both a shaky camera and strenuous slow motion, but also lets the pace drag at an excruciatingly gradual slog and gets bogged down in way too much tedious tin-eared dialogue (sample dreadful line: "This is not a joke; trust me, it's not a joke"). The cruddy acting by the lame no-name cast doesn't help matters any. Ditto the pedestrian cinematography, the unlikable and underdeveloped cardboard cut-out characters (mean bully, shameless slut, a couple of awkward geeks, etc.), choppy editing, the shoddy (not so) special effects (the monsters are obviously folks wearing tattered rags and tacky rubber masks that look like they wear purchased dirt cheap at a dollar store), the irritating rock soundtrack, the ridiculously heavy-handed central message about adolescent peer pressure, the surprising lack of any serious graphic gore (gross slime dripping from mouths doesn't count), and the incredibly limp and dissatisfying "it ain't over yet!" ending. The total pits.

OK, this movie isn't going to win an Oscar anytime soon (or anytime at all, by the way), in fact it's outright bad! Bad acting, bad script, bad everything. For you who wants to know, this little pearl of a movie is about some students who have a lame party at the cemetery, only to attacked by monsters with bad teeth. The next day, three of the students have become monsters themselves, uttering bad lines, flexing some muscles and behaving strange in general.

So why bother watching it, you might wonder. Because it's fun!!! Cast and crew alike seem to know it's bad beyond belief (they don't do anything about it), but they go for it anyway!! That's the spirit!!

The film starts off with the appearance of a bad low budget film. I found it to be surprisingly good. The first scene has multiple killings and escapes from a metal institution, where killer Joe curls up in a fetal position by a headstone in a cemetery.

The scene then cuts to a high school. Bully Darryl (Jon Thomas Olson) is picking on a geek. New guy Mel (Cameron Zeidler) comes to their aid and wins the admiration of Suzanne (Karrie MacLaine) former conquest of Darryl. They bullies extend the olive branch by inviting the Mel and the geeks out to party by said cemetery which turns into a hazing.

At this point the film turns weird as the geeks suddenly act like they ate "The Stuff." Pardon my obscure 80's classic reference.

The film was fairly well acted. Low budget entertainment. Don't expect too much from special effects.

Parental Guide: sex, nudity (Tara Taylor).



T