REVIEW: After Midnight (1989)

Just when you think that the minimum running time for a scary story is ninety minutes, you come across the old creepy movie stand-by, the anthology picture. Anthology films seem to be loved and hated with equal ferocity; some people love the variety of having several stories in one movie, while others whine because a lot of anthology films suffer tonal problems from different directors and casts. Personally, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I find that a lot of horror anthology films are anthology films because none of the stories within them are good enough to last for more than twenty minutes; a lot of the newer anthology releases these days are just low-grade amateur shorts that were bought up and packaged together for pocket change.

Then again, we're not talking nowadays, since tonight's film After Midnight was released all the way back in 1989, which was a decent year for drive-in movies. It was pretty much at the top of the video release market, when the Elm Streets and Friday the 13th franchises were still going strong. Most importantly in my version of the history of horror, it was pre-Scream, the film which somehow managed to introduce irony into the genre thereby ruining everything with hipness and self-references.

After Midnight begins in one of the most terrifying locales in the entire genre: a freshman psych class. The new and mysterious professor Edward Derek is teaching "The Psychology of Fear," and he announces quite proudly to the class that they're not going to need their books -- he'll be using other kinds of teaching techniques this semester. For instance, he pulls a gun on the jock in the class, and threatens to blow his brains out until the jock pees himself. Then, he turns the gun on himself and paints the wall behind him with red, gooey blood. Naturally, the class is horrified, until Prof. Derek stands up and giggles that it was all special effects; he was trying to make them afraid. Afraid of having to find a new elective when most class slots will already be filled.

Whereas in reality, where Derek would be arrested and sued more times than I can count on one hand, the movie administration simply tells him not to do that again. Apparently they're pretty light on the administrative action over there at After Midnight University. Anyway, the professor suggests that for those in the class that aren't afraid of a little extra class time, he will continue to hold his own private study sessions at his house.

Once the after-hours session (which most of the class shows up for) begins, they settle down and begin sharing scary stories to inspire fear in each other. So far I've neglected to mention that the framing story's lead girl (a shaky, willowy girl that gets "bad feelings" about things) starts to get "bad feelings" about this class. And the study group. And the teacher. She gets a lot of bad feelings, and she has to mention allll of them. The girl is completely unimportant to about 99% of the film, so we won't get hung up on her.

The first tale is the only one that I would actually classify as a "horror" story. It stars Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen to most of you) as a timid man whose car gets a flat on the side of a lonely country road, after a scenic drive with his wife following his birthday dinner. It seems that someone has thrown a bagful of tacks on the road not too far away from the creepy old house -- the same creepy house where thatt madman murdered all those people with hedge clippers. There's a light on in one of the upper rooms of the mansion, and before Marc McClure can say "We should get help from Superman!" his wife is off and running to look for a phone to call AAA with. After they enter, she disappears, and it's up to him to find her and perhaps defend himself from the hedge murderer. I won't give away the ending, but it's one that I've remembered since I saw it in about 1990; it's unfortunate that it doesn't really hold up after all these years, but it's still pretty neat in a way.

The second story is the one that I remembered as not being all that scary as a kid, and it turns out I was right. It's the story of four underage girls driving around the seedy parts of town looking for a good club to dance the night away in. Because they're stupid, they end up running out of gas in what appears to be the ninth circle of Los Angeles, a filthy, empty, and altogether abandoned section of town. Actually, it's only mostly abandoned, since they have an encounter with a crazy homeless man and his vicious dogs. He's all set to rape and murder them when the girls get the upper hand and make a car sandwich with him as the meat. You'd think it was all over, then, right? I hope you didn't say yes. There's still three or four nasty dogs left to hunt them down in revenge. This story was actually pretty well done, although it would be a stretch to call it a horror story; at best, it's an action thriller. There's lots of running and jumping and even some explosions at the end, but nothing remotely supernatural (or even creepy) going on. As a plus, three of the four girls are recognizable from other projects, two of them from an installment of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the other from her role on "Mr. Belvedere."

The final story-within-a-story is the "crazy man keeps calling me and may be getting physically closer and I can't get anyone to help me oh shit I think he's inside the building" story. Having rented When a Stranger Calls not too far in the past, this one just didn't work for me. Marg Helgenberger plays Alex, a receptionist for a late-night telephone answering service. (Didn't they have answering machines in 1989? Heck, I saw one in Kiss Me Deadly, and that came out in 19-fifty-nine.) Alex is just getting back from a skiing vacation, and she's got the broken leg to prove it. Upon her return, her boss informs her that she's had to fire everyone except her, so she's all by her lonesome until tomorrow -- oh, and there's this guy that calls about a dozen times an hour. I have to admit, the rest of the story lost me. The crazy guy is calling some rich woman, and is seen standing outside the woman's apartment. Later, he switches to harassing Alex, and manages to track her down. In the end, there's one accidental death, and the dude is still calling Alex, so it's like the story actually has no ending. You can probably skip this one, unless you've got some kind of receptionist-with-a-broken-leg fetish, in which case I recommend that you get this immediately. That's a tough fetish to appease.

Getting back to the framing story again, the psychic girl Allison starts to get a bad feeling again, and as it happens the bad feeling is correct. That urine-stained jock from the beginning of the film is back to make the professor experience his own kind of fear, and starts a ruckus. The professor -- being an extremely creepy man -- keeps egging on the jock, and before he can change the course to Pass/Fail the professor has been immolated, and turns into an angry walking skeleton with a fire ax. Like any good finale, there's a lot of wind and lights, and Allison gets briefly transported into each of the stories as she's being chased by the skeleton. And then...

...she wakes up. Goddammit I hate when they do that. It's such a cop-out. It's even more of a cop-out when she gets out of bed to go to class, which happens to be the first day of psych 101: the Psychology of Fear. This is likely the scariest moment in the entire film, because it poses the threat of having to watch it alllllll overrrr agaaaaaain. If I were authoring the DVD, I'd make it really scary and have it automatically got right back to chapter one when she got to class. I wonder how long I could make people sit there and think the movie was really going someplace.

Did it live up to my childhood memories? I'm afraid not. It was more of a pleasant trip back down the nostalgia path. Still, the production quality was relatively high (especially for this kind of movie), and the direction wasn't bad. Strangely, I think the acting in the sub-stories was actually pretty good; I do recall thinking for a moment during the "dog" section of the film that the way that the four girls were all given different personalities was actually quite impressive for what was essentially a short film. The worst performances come in during the framing tale, where Allison the psychic deserved a good smacking, and the good professor deserved some non-Shatner thespian tips -- it's a performance that's best described as "off-kilter."

Before I damn the movie with so much faint praise, I'll cut this off and say that if it came on cable on a dark and rainy night, I'd check it out again. Until then, it's going back on the DVD shelf.