After Midnight is an anthology horror film that follows a college class taking Psychology 102. Which is apparently the psychology of fear. The professor uses very unorthodox methods to teach his students about fear. To understand fear you must feel fear. So he holds a gun to one of his students heads and quite literally scares the piss out of him. After that he stages a fake suicide to frighten the whole class. Needless to say the school board isn't pleased with his methods and forces him to teach a more traditional style. However, he decides to hold a private seminar at his home for those students brace enough to attend. Here he takes a much lighter approach to scaring his students. Telling scary stories...Yeah this guy went from shooting himself in the head to telling scary stories.
The first tale follows a married couple out celebrating the husbands birthday. They go for a drive and come across an old abandoned home that once belonged to a murderer. Looking for some adventure, the couple decides to break in and explore it. Little does the husband know that this is all an elaborate setup to frighten him before revealing a surprise party. The frights go a little too far and the husband mistakenly ends up decapitating his wife. This story is a little slow to develop, but the ending is kind of fun.
The second tale follows 4 young girls who are out to do some clubbing. Due to them being underage they are unable to enter any clubs. They soon get lost in a bad part of town and run low on fuel. They stop at a seemingly abandoned gas station to call for help only to find a man and his 3 dogs inhabiting the building. After the man attempts to rape one of the girls they make their escape and must now avoid him and his 3 violent dogs that are in hot pursuit. This story is more of a thriller than an actual horror tale. It's probably the weakest story in the film but features a lot of poor character decisions and a very over the top ending.
The third and final story is about a woman who operates an apartments phone directory. She just returned from a ski trip where she broke her leg. Her first night back on the job she receives multiple phone calls from a deranged man looking to get ahold of a famous woman that lives in the apartment buildings. The man finally enters the building and kills the woman he's been calling about. He then turns his attention to the phone operator. This is a decent segment that squanders some of its potential. I felt that despite having her leg broken, the protagonist makes good use of her crutches and never seems to have much of a handicap.
Overall After Midnight isn't a terrible anthology film. The wrap around starts off pretty interesting, but goes off the rails once the first story is told. Each short is pretty engaging though despite their shortcomings. I've seen better anthology films and I've seen much worse.
Body Count:5
No comments:
Post a Comment