#133 -- Midnight Movie (2008)

Director: Jack Messitt
Rating: 4/5

Some people are afraid of horror movies, because in the back of their minds, they think it's real, and that the killer will come for them. But in this case, that fear is perfectly reasonable. The Avenue movie theater was having a midnight showing of a forty year old horror movie called The Dark Beneath. Not many people showed up for it. There was a biker couple, four friends, two police officer, and a little boy. The four friends were Bridgit, the manager of the theater; Bridgit's boyfriend, Josh; and Mario and his girlfriend. Bridgit's little brother Timmy was in on the action as well. Their movie started off normal: a group of friends with car trouble going into a strange house for help. The kids started dying off one by one, of course, but there was a twist. And certain points in the movie, the screen would twitch, and the cameras would switch to somewhere inside the movie theater. The cameras followed a theater patron, and the movie-viewers had the pleasure of watching their friends die. Once the killer was done with them, he would take them back inside the movie, and throw them into the basement with the rest of his victims. He could move between the movie and the real world, taking people with him each time. The problem was that, in a movie, no one really dies. So, no matter what he did to them, they couldn't die. They had to live in pain, while he tortured them endlessly. The only way to get out of that torture was to escape the movie before the end credits rolled.

I really enjoyed this one. It was a cool kind of alternate reality deal, but it managed to not be stupid. The killer was delightfully creepy, with his skull-face and shuffling walk; his mother also played a part in the murders and she was reminiscent of Mrs. Bates herself. The characters were likable and everything was really well done. The killer's weapon of choice was a giant handheld screw looking thing. I'm not sure what it was exactly, but it was pretty awesome. He used it to gut, stab, slice, and even electrocute. A Mr. Radford created the movie, and we first met him in a mental hospital (where he watched the movie, bit a chunk out of his own wrist and drew symbols in his own blood; then he killed pretty much everyone in the facility). He'd created some kind of threshold, I suppose, where nothing is fake and every horror is real. It was definitely interesting and very enjoyable.