Rish Outfield's reviews
A grainy, unintentionally creepy 70's crapfest that's as depressing as it is poorly done, I used the words "awful," "bullcrap," and "abominable" in my notes to describe Midnight. When her policeman foster father gets a little frisky, a teenage girl (I think, the character's name was Nancy) runs away and decides to hitchhike with a couple of boys. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, they meet up with death, in the guise of a family of inbred hillbilly satanists.
I guess you could say, in this thing's defense, that it doesn't pull any punches. But that only makes it all the harder to watch. There is very little character development, but I couldn't help but want Nancy and the two boys to survive, simply because they were human beings. To me, the highpoint of this piece was when they went on a shoplifting spree in a convenience store and I got to see what Hostess products looked like twenty years ago. None of the satanists stood out in any way, though there was the token huge grunting one, and the obligatory unkillable one. It claimed to have makeup by Tom Savini, but it was no Tom Savini I know. I know it doesn't rip off every element of Texas Chainsaw, but the other ones they stole from The Hills Have Eyes. Hey, eight out of ten ain't bad. It had an awful ending in which virtually everybody died, but you're supposed to feel that justice was served anyway. The thing that most stuck with me about Midnight was its awful, near-indescribably bad theme song, sang with empty-headed folk music optimism unseen outside sanitarium walls. With lyrics so trite they make the worst Carpenters song sound like the Diva in The Fifth Element, I heard "You're on your own, you're all alone, you can't go home...anymore" in my blackest dreams. And to make worse into worst, they played the song no less than FOUR times. In describing my long bouts with that cheery tune, I wrote in my notes "Glib, sickening shite."
This had a very low-budget, was poorly acted and filmed, and had an air of bad taste that rose above the incompetent points. One of the most disturbing things about this film, besides its grittiness and somewhat real feel, is how much Horror fans seem to like it. Come on, people . . . I know there's a lot of bad Horror out there, but let's have a little self-respect, just for a minute.