AllMovie

Jack Messitt's Midnight Movie pays homage to exactly what the title suggests it would: pulpy genre movies with gaping holes in their logic and execution, making them suited for no one more discerning than the kitsch-loving crowds that come out on Friday night. It's appropriate, then, that Midnight Movie is exactly one of these movies itself. That's both a compliment and an indictment. The midnight movie that plays in Midnight Movie is actually the best part about Messitt's film. Modeled on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and hailing from the same time period), "The Dark Beneath" -- a cult horror that sent its director to the insane asylum, according to the film's mythology -- features a bunch of dippy hippies on a road trip, whose broken-down car leaves them in the murderous path of a rustic man wearing overalls and a partial skull as his grungy mask. He uses a cone-shaped corkscrew blade bigger than his fist to punch through flesh. This stuff is great, and Messitt has given his killer distinctively menacing, and memorable, traits. What doesn't make much sense, even in the notoriously forgiving realm of the horror movie, is how the killer appears at a midnight screening of his own movie, starts killing audience members one by one, then seamlessly edits live footage of their murders into the movie as it unspools in the projection booth. It would be tempting to say that it doesn't matter -- that the film is such a faithful send-up, the killer's powers over space and time are illogical by design. But the truth is, it does affect a viewer's enjoyment -- just a little bit. Still, for having a relatively small budget and a cast of unknowns capably filling out the slate of victims, Messitt has come up with a tasty little treat here.