After Midnight

Sometimes I really should listen when Netflix is like "You're not gonna like it." But sometimes you gotta throw caution to the wind, bite down on a stick, and watch the movie. Suffice it to say that in After Midnight, no one let it all hang down. Nor did anyone chug-a-lug and shout. Though had any of that occurred, the movie might have turned out better.

After Midnight is an anthology movie, à la Tales From The Crypt (the original one from 1972, so I sound cooler). There's the basic overarching story, Allison's Tale. Within this story, there are three short episodes: The Old Dark House, A Night On The Town, and All Night Messenger. I'm gonna go ahead and spoil the hell out of these stories, because there is no reason for you to waste your time seeing this movie. Trust me, it's not going to ruin anything for you.

The Old Dark House

A couple is out celebrating the husband's birthday. The wife laments that she wants to get her husband something better than the watch she has for him. After a walk, she asks him to take the long way home. Along the way, they pass an old house where it's rumored a bunch of people had their heads chopped off with garden shears (ooh, how scurry!). On cue, the cars driver-side tires blow out. The husband finds tacks in the road, and is convinced by his wife to head to the old house to see if they have a phone. Luckily, as they had driven past, a light in the upstairs room had been on and goes off, so they know somebody's home. When no one answers the door, the wife decides a little breaking and entering is in order, and why not. I mean if some jerk is gonna be home and not answer the door, they deserve to get their shit broken into. She crawls in through a window, but never opens the door for her husband. In a shocking turn of events (by which I mean the husband tries the knob), the front door is found to be unlocked. With the wife nowhere in sight, the husband does what anyone would do: traipses about the house like he owns the damn place, finding a bloody pearl necklace and knocking over a priceless table with several skulls on it covered in bugs. Stumbling towards the front door, a set of sliding doors opens to reveal the menacingly wrinkled killer, complete with garden shears. The doors slide shut, and while the husband is losing his shit out in the foyer, the camera pans around to reveal that the killer is actually a puppet operated by the wife. The whole stunt is part of the husband's birthday surprise. Really, what could go wrong here. If you guessed the husband having a fatal heart attack and ruining his birthday surprise, you'd only be half right. If you guessed everybody jumps out and yells surprise and the husband enjoys his birthday surprise, you're an idiot. Using the sword from the suit of armor in the foyer, he proceeds to chop his wife's head off in an attempt to kill the killer. Happy birthday indeed. So the lesson here is if you're thinking of doing something exciting for your spouse's birthday, try fancy underwear, or a nice dinner, or a massage, or an old fashioned. Avoid scary places and sharp objects. Cuz it's totally hilarious until someone gets stabbed. Especially because it'll probably be you.

A Night On The Town

There's no way to put this nicely: this story was dumb as shit. A quartet of teenage girls heads to the big city for a night of fun. As is typical, the girl least able to pull off being grown up is the one with the car that ruins it for everybody. So they get rejected from the club they're trying to sneak their way into. Then they get lost. Then they stop at a rundown gas station. Then they get accosted by a homeless-looking guy. I guess he can't really be homeless since he seems to live at the gas station with his three dogs: a dangerous looking German Shepherd (cringe), a frightening Doberman (cower), and, quite possibly the worst of the three, a giant fucking Irish Terrier (SHIT YOUR PANTS!). I'll give you a minute while you change into a fresh pair of drawers. So the not-homeless homeless guy tries to attack the girls. They kill him. His dogs take revenge, chasing the girls all over the damn place, until at last the girls blow up a bunch drums filled with flammable liquid conveniently left behind at the old run down mill of some kind....and then that's it. No ghost dogs, no the dogs made it out and are back for more. That's it. Oh, and the annoying girl who got everybody into trouble repeatedly? Yeah, she gets her comeuppance when she darts out of the car and is "eaten" by the dogs. I'm almost glad she did. Stupid twit. Next time she'll be more mature...or not, I guess.

All Night Messenger

In an interesting bit of movie trivia, Marg Helgenberger (of CSI fame) stars in this tale alongside her future ex-husband Alan Rosenberg. According to the Wikiz, they were married in 1989, the year this movie was made, so they were either already married, or would soon be married. How touching. Anyway, back to the exciting stuff....after I tell you about this story. Gotcha! Helgenberger plays an answering service operator with a broken leg (skiing accident) who sits in front of one of those old switch boards with the giant headphone plug holes (perhaps this made more sense back in the late 80's than it does today). Taking over the night shift, she's repeatedly called by a creeper (Rosenberg) who initially leaves a message for a famous actress or model or something who has hired the answering service. Then he ratchets up the creeper vibe by calling back repeatedly. Eventually, it's revealed he's camped out in a phone booth outside the actress's apartment, and he sneaks in and strangles her with the phone cord. Then he sets his sights on Helgenberger. He kills the answering service's owner (also with a phone cord), calls from the lobby of the building where the answering service is, and manages to make her kill the security guard with a broken crutch (yeah, one of those I stabbed you once in a pretty innocuous place but obviously punctured a vital artery/organ because you died in five seconds kills). The last time she answers the phone, the creeper, who apparently is really the Phone Cord Strangler is sitting behind her...apparently there's a random phone right next to the phone switch board. I'm thinking the guy that put this one together really had a phone boner. More than the dude that made Phone Booth. Serious phone boner. Probably creams his pants every time he watches that Saved By The Bell episode where Zack borrows his dad's cell phone. "Oooh, brick phone. Yeah, you take that call. Ye---gggg...I'm spent."

Allison's Tale

This is the story that wraps around the other three. We start off at community college, or some school of that caliber. Allison and her friend Cheryl are headed to their first day of Psych 102, The Psychology of Fear (dun-dun-duhnnununununuh). Allison's got a bad feeling about the class, but goes anyway. In the first lesson, the professor, one googly-eyed Edward Derek, proceeds to explain his plan of involving the class in fear experiments as opposed to just tedious book work. For his first jaunt into Fearland, he busts out a revolver, loads a bullet into it, spins the chamber, and proceeds to put it to the head of the smarmy jock in the front row who is not afraid of anything. So the jock pees his pants (cuz peein' your pants is cool) and runs out of the class vowing revenge. He then proceeds to shoot himself in the head, but it turns out the bullet was a blank, the blood was a squib (a miniature explosive, not a Harry Potter squib) and he's not dead at all. Although he probably will be soon since the wall is now covered in fake blood. The next day, a dejected Derek gives the class a list of books to read, because after threatening to kill a student, he's still gainfully employed but can't teach the class the way he wanted to. I suppose it could have been a complaint from a disgruntled janitor who had to clean the mess up. Ahh, the shit you could get away with in the late 80's. So after relating his regret at this course correction (see what I did there?), he invites the students to his house for extracurricular excursions into Fearland. Later at his house, Allison, Cheryl, and a handful of other students are invited to share scary stories. Derek's tale is The Old Dark House. Another student relates A Night On The Town, which he heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, so it has to be true. Cheryl shares All Night Messenger, which she had been reluctant to share because of how much it scared her to think about it, though she's probably the only one. All the while, strange things keep happening: the power goes out, it gets cold in the house, Derek's googly eyes keep looking like they'd prefer to jump out of his skull and strut about the room. And Allison keeps expressing an unknown fear that Derek seems to know about, encouraging her to "tell her story." As the final tale wraps up, Derek heads down to the basement to check on the furnace, and finds the jock from earlier has broken into his house. The jock strings him up by his feet and threatens to kill Derek with an ax. The jock creates a ring of fire around Derek (Ring Of Fire, After Midnight, somebody's a big fan of classic rock) that he eventually swings free of. Derek then takes the ax and proceeds to kill the jock. Then he catches on fire and keeps hacking away at the jock. Then Cheryl and Allison try to leave, but Cheryl is sucked into the fire. Yep, lifted off her feet and pulled into the blaze for no apparent reason. Allison then begins to run through the house trying to escape, but keeps ending up in the settings for each of the stories, being chased by Derek, who has transformed into an extra from Jason and the Argonauts (skeleton) with an ax. After stumbling through each tale, Allison is cornered by Skele-Derek and just as the ax is about to split her skull in twain, she wakes up from the horrible dream and heads to school. There, she and her friend Cheryl are heading to their first day of Psych 102, The Psychologt of Fear! (Go ahead and read that course title in a scary voice. Whatever your best is, it's probably scarier than this movie).

So there you have it, After Midnight. I'm sure you're frightened out of your mind at this point, so I'll give you a few minutes to collect your thoughts...OK, time's up. So yeah, pretty lackluster film. Not horrible quality for late 80's, but horrible quality for anything resembling a scary movie. I suppose it's possible I'm just far too used to the horror movies of recent years, so I don't scare easily. Perhaps this film was quite scary in 1989 and struck fear in watchers in the same way that Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven struck fear into the hearts of 19th century simpletons. But really, 5 years after Nightmare on Elm Street, you're gonna have to aim a little higher. And how about we take it easy on the "it was all a dream" endings. For serial.

Book em, Pearlo:

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