The Midnight Hour (1985)

A horror comedy from the mid-1980s, The Midnight Hour has maintained a small, but loyal, fanbase, and with good reason. It's a cracking little movie, and something that would fit perfectly in any Halloween schedule. If you haven't seen it yet then do give it a go. If you have seen it then do your bit to promote it to everyone else.

The plot is quite simple. A bunch of teenagers decide to pretend to raise the dead one Halloween night, and end up actually raising the dead. Of course, they don't know it at the time. The town starts to be overrun by strange ghouls and evil creatures while the teens focus on enjoying a Halloween party. They can't remain oblivious to the situation forever, but will they realise what's going on before too many people are transformed into creatures of the night?

Written by William Bleich, and directed by Jack Bender, this is an atmospheric movie that makes up for a lack of any real frights with a great sense of fun, and that Halloween spirit poured over almost every main scene. It also gets away with a musical moment that's genuinely enjoyable, despite the fact that it should be eye-rollingly cheesy. Bleich may not have written the best dialogue, but he sets everything up quickly enough and allows for a lot of satisfying character moments throughout. Bender takes the material, and boosts it with great visual style, and plenty of dry ice.

The cast is a good mix of great actors and likable folk, with my particular favourites being Dedee Pfeiffer, LeVar Burton, Kurtwood Smith and Kevin McCarthy. Lee Montgomery is the nominal lead, and does okay, while Shari Belafonte and Jonna Lee stand out as two very different young women hoping to make the most of their Halloween night. And the voice of Wolfman Jack bellowing out of the radio is a huge bonus, as is the quite wonderful soundtrack (seriously, this is a soundtrack that I would buy immediately).

If you like the horror movies of Fred Dekker and Joe Dante, and I can't think of too many people who don't, then this is for you. It has a similiar vibe, both in the way it's respectful to the genre conventions while also playing around with them slightly and also in how it shows darkness seeping into an unprepared small town in America.

A perfect film to watch while sitting in the dark, perhaps accompanied by the flickering light of a jack-o-lantern.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Midnight-night-NON-USA-FORMAT-Reg-2/dp/B00B6581IG/ref=sr_1_4?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1401893717&sr=1-4&keywords=the+midnight+hour

Rise Of The Zombies (2012)

Another zombie movie from The Asylum, and another one directed by Nick Lyons (who also gave viewers the poor, but slightly better than this, Zombie Apocalypse), Rise Of The Zombies features the usual selection of jobbing actors trying to invest their paper-thin characters with something, anything, to make the movie more watchable as it repeats the same cycle for 90 minutes until a weak, weak ending.

Things start off promising. Survivors of the zombie outbreak are holed up in Alcatraz. There's potential here, but it's soon squandered. Zombies still get in and the main characters all make stupid decision after stupid decision, culminating in the moment when they set off from the island in search of safety elsewhere. Because that's a better decision than killing the zombies that managed to get in and reinforcing the huge stronghold that is Alcatraz. Zombies munch on folks, people bicker, zombies munch on folks, people bicker, repeat ad nauseum. Oh, there's also LeVar Burton, stuck with having to play possibly the stupidest doctor that I've ever seen in any zombie movie. Ever. He is determined to find a cure that will save the one he loves.

There are one or two decent moments here, with one scene showing how easy it is for zombies to climb up the Golden Gate bridge being as enjoyable as it is ridiculously stupid, but there's no reason to ever seek this film out beyond stumbling across it accidentally on the TV schedules. Lyons isn't the worst director, but writers Keith Allan and Delondra Williams didn't make his job any easier by churning out such a laughable and lame script.

The cast includes Mariel Hemingway, Danny Trejo (currently tied with Ving Rhames in the "pay me and I'll turn up for anything" category), Ethan Suplee, the aforementioned Burton, French Stewart, and Chad Lindberg. The rest of the cast is made up of the usual supporting players for The Asylum AKA people who can rack up a long list of credits on IMDb thanks to their portrayal of "screaming zombie victim #8". Hey, nothing against that, a job is a job, but all I'm emphasising is that the rest of the cast features nobody truly memorable. There are one or two other main characters, but the cast can't do enough to overcome the weak script. Without having any recognition factor they just blur together into one featureless crowd.

Rise Of The Zombies isn't good, in case you didn't gather that already. Some of the effects are okay, but a lot of the film just feels rushed and/or lazy. Critics of The Asylum may rush to tell me that ALL of their films feel that way, but I'd disagree. Sometimes they do appear to be trying. Just not on this occasion.

3/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Zombies-DVD-Danny-Trejo/dp/B00BFCJLT8/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1395320665&sr=1-1&keywords=rise+of+the+zombies