As other folks with their comments on this movie have stated this low-budget early 80's fright film has its fair share of flaws. First off the acting is strictly hit or miss. Melanie Verlin is merely adequate as the teen runaway heroine, John Hall and Charles Jackson are solid and engaging as the two nice young guys who give Verlin a lift, and John Amplas of George Romero's "Martin" is terrifically creepy as one of the vicious backwoods Satanists our luckless trio run afoul of. However, the actor who plays the priest is just terrible and the actress who plays the priest's daughter is likewise pretty bad. Thankfully, late, great tough guy character thesp supreme Lawrence Tierney contributes an excellent performance as Verlin's disgustingly incestuous and alcoholic cop stepfather. Moreover, the first forty-odd minutes of the feature are gruelingly slow, tedious and uneventful. The cheesy soft rock theme song is truly atrocious. The dialogue tends to be flat and stilted.
On the plus side the rough, grainy cinematography does work; it adds a certain gritty documentary-like believability to the horrific proceedings. The deranged family of bloodthirsty redneck Devil worshipers are genuinely scary, especially the crazed chortling fat guy and the eerily beautiful brunette. When the horror elements of the story finally kick in they are every bit as stark, brutal, nasty and frightening as they ought to be. The opening scene where a little girl is savagely beaten to death by the Satanists is positively bloodcurdling. A feeling of nightmarish hopelessness asserts itself in the second half and proves to be powerfully unsettling in its unsparing bleakness. The sequences where people are ritualistically sacrificed are definitely shocking and disturbing. Having the female victims locked up in cages like animals is a cool deviant touch. Tom Savini's minimal gore make-up is top-notch as usual. And the ending has a few neat touches of irony, with the best being how the initially reprehensible Tierney turns out to be the film's hero. Although it's way too imperfect and uneven to qualify as some kind of lost classic (the clunky opening half is frankly a bit of a chore to slog through), "Midnight" overall rates as a pretty solid and effective little rural shocker that gets better as it goes along.
On the plus side the rough, grainy cinematography does work; it adds a certain gritty documentary-like believability to the horrific proceedings. The deranged family of bloodthirsty redneck Devil worshipers are genuinely scary, especially the crazed chortling fat guy and the eerily beautiful brunette. When the horror elements of the story finally kick in they are every bit as stark, brutal, nasty and frightening as they ought to be. The opening scene where a little girl is savagely beaten to death by the Satanists is positively bloodcurdling. A feeling of nightmarish hopelessness asserts itself in the second half and proves to be powerfully unsettling in its unsparing bleakness. The sequences where people are ritualistically sacrificed are definitely shocking and disturbing. Having the female victims locked up in cages like animals is a cool deviant touch. Tom Savini's minimal gore make-up is top-notch as usual. And the ending has a few neat touches of irony, with the best being how the initially reprehensible Tierney turns out to be the film's hero. Although it's way too imperfect and uneven to qualify as some kind of lost classic (the clunky opening half is frankly a bit of a chore to slog through), "Midnight" overall rates as a pretty solid and effective little rural shocker that gets better as it goes along.