Night of Horror (1981)

Peeps, I've never steered you wrong before, have I? I've guided you through the jungles of bad many times - shown you the better-than-bad, the worse-than-bad - and through it all I've always used bad as the starting point.

Why? Because any fool can point at Citizen Kane and say, "ooh, good movie". Just like any fool can point at Beast Of Yucca Flats and say, "ooh, bad movie". But you have to look at the details, the nuances that run through a film to see what makes them what they are. What, in essence, makes a movie good or bad. There's the production, the script, the acting, the direction and so much more to take into consideration in what is basically a beauty contest where all that the contestants have going for them are great personalities.

So it goes with strictly bad movies. Using bad movie-making ideas as a basis, you notice the direction first of all - how it's blocked and what it focuses on. Then the acting - what it relays to the viewer and how effective they are at indicating how scared they are or how much urgency there is in the immanent alien attack. And of course there are the quality of the special effects - in bad movies, if there are good effects that's okay, but if they're bad effects, that still isn't necessarily bad. Who wants Industrial Light and Magic in a movie about killer tomatoes? Get it? All of this and more have to meld in a way to either make a bad movie better or worse. And yes, there are levels to bad movies. They can be enjoyable and fun to watch or painful to endure. Either way, they're bad - the devil's in the details, though.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in the movie I'm about to dig into now. Night of Horror is a bad movie, to be sure. Probably the worst I've ever seen (yet). But it's also the most enjoyably bad movie I've ever had the honor of suffering through.

But before I go on: Steve (Steve Sandkuhler) tells a story to his fellow band mate Chris (Tony Malanowski) about an RV road trip he takes to Virginia with his brother Jeff (Jeff Canfield) to check out a cabin left to them by their father. Also along for the trip are Jeff's wife Colleen (Gae Schmitt) and her friend Susan (Rebecca Bach), who herself is somewhat psychic and can feel the presence of otherworldly forces the closer they get to their destination. Steve is immediately smitten by Susan and her Edgar Allen Poe-quoting ways and predilection for sensing the dead. After a long trip in their trusty RV nicknamed Excalibur and a quick repair of same vehicle, they reach the cabin and are then approached by the ghosts of Confederate soldiers who tell them stories about their dead captain.

Writer/actor/director Tony Malanowski was to the Seventies what these young tyros with camcorders and PC editors are to today's crop of DIY film-making. The only difference is back in the Seventies, the tyros didn't have all the fancy-schmancy bells and whistles you young whippersnappers have at your disposal today. Old-style cameras did the trick (some of which recorded sound too, if you were lucky), they edited with movieolas and splicers, scratched some lightning effects right onto the film stock with a needle if necessary and they were good to go. All they had to do was find a theater owner kind enough to reel it up for a one-night-only special engagement showing or just set up a movie screen at the local VFW basement. Either way, it was being shown to an audience!

Malanowski had a harder time of it, though. After all, this wasn't the same thing as pushing a project where five men in black suits wait in a warehouse until they find out which one of them is a cop, or go hiking into the woods with a camcorder to find the Blair Witch. And in spite of sounding like the beginning of The Evil Dead, no wild special effects or ingenious camera angles will be in display here. Still...it has something.

There are so many glaring oversights here that are never explained or taken for granted that it becomes something of an Olympic event to catch and catalog them all. First thing I can't get over is the fact that Chris meets Steve in a bar that is clearly in someone's (maybe even Malanowski's) basement! Seriously: Chris even walks out at the end and through a backyard with a swimming pool in it!

Then we have our two band members - of which Steve has a big bushy white guy 'fro and fu manchu 'stache and Chris wears a headband...so of course they belong to a band! - sitting at a bar in front of what has to be the shiniest, most-reflective wood paneling ever. It hurts your eyes, seeing the klieg lights glinting off the polished pressed wood surface, though not as much as the act of watching their interaction. But it hurts.

Then Malanowski (director) makes sure both of them sit and talk with their backs to the camera for the whole scene! I'd call this an artistic conceit if there were any art in Night of Horror but there isn't, so I won't. Hey, Malanowski: why not set up a camera at each end of the bar to at least get a side view of your characters talking? Or even a nice close-up of each face every so often? Once you establish the setting - even if it's not a good setting - you don't need to keep on establishing it for the next five-to-ten minutes!

But it's enjoyable to watch the scenes stumble past as they do; you tend to wonder in the first few minutes of a film if it is going to be worth watching. With Night of Horror, you're going to have to wonder only a little bit after watching a setup like this - you'll want to see if the rest of the movie is up to the same standards. This one is. Hoo boy, is it.

The acting is something else and altogether on par with the lighting and camera setup. We're talking like the drama coach were Corey Feldman, and all the recitations of line were done just after walking the actors up from a sound sleep. Even when they do raise their voices it's like they're not sure if the line's to be read as angry, as excited, as shocked, of if they're just supposed to use their inside voice and not wake up the camera man. Or the bartender, who's nowhere in sight for the first and last scenes in this "bar".

You know a movie's in trouble when it can't afford to hire a bartender.

Besides which, Night of Horror is more of a flashback story! You know what I mean: it's like in the beginning when two guys are talking, one of them says, "let me tell you what happened," cue a harp run, the screen wiggles then dissolves into a whole different scene - THEN we get our body of movie. Flashback story. It's usually book-ended with the same two guys revealing a shocking revelation at the end ("I'm dead!" "I'm pregnant!" "I'm a secret op!" "I'm Charlie Sheen!"), but not always. Sometimes it just...ends.

The actors in Night of Horror, however, may not seem to be all that invested with this story; suffice it to say they give less than a community theater effort. Less than a school play effort. less than a pre-school talent show effort. This looks like someone whipped out a video camera at a family reunion and told their long-lost cousins to improv. And stop looking in the camera, Cousin Eustace!

Steve Sandkuhler's Steve is a good candidate for The Most Non-Expressive Actor In Any Movie Ever, especially seeing that he has the kind of a voice that suggests the kid you knew in school that always talked through his nose and sounded like he was bored to death reading aloud to the class. Jeff Canfield's Jeff makes the kinda-odd choice to do a lisping characterization of a brother of Steve's, suggesting that somewhere along the way their dad had to have adopted. And both Gae Schmitt and Rebecca Bach might as well have played each others' roles back and forth throughout the movie for as much difference as there is in their performances. And Malanowski, playing Chris in the bookend scenes, tries to pull one over on us by going by the alias Tony Stark - proving that the only connection between his Stark and "that other Stark" is that Malanowski has the acting talent of a cast-iron door stop.

Night of Horror is not a film that rewards those looking for intense acting, however. This is something you would parallel closer to an "experience", more than anything else. You know what I mean - like a Grateful Dead concert. It's something different for every viewer, and each time you can bet it's a fun experience for all.

We even get a sequence in Night Of Horror where a group of Civil War re-enacters get to ply their craft, fire their blanks, wear their uniforms and raise the Stars and Bars. It's amazing, but scenes like this seem to crop up to breathe life into little movies like this. It did the same thing for that MST3K fave Time Chasers when the Yanks fought the Rebs - but this movie has a difference...which is the re-enactment is the ONLY TIME we see and Confederate soldier faces. The rest of the time the Confederate ghosts we see are all shadowy, backlit, fog machine-shrouded and slow-talking groaners who, for what I can tell, don't have a trace of a Southern accent. Guess that's the first thing to go in the afterlife....

Of course, for all the mundane and drab, there are highlights here and there. For one, there is a scene where Susan is sitting within Excalibur as it careens down the road to nowhere and, all of a sudden, she is thrown from her seat as it suddenly lurches to a stop. all well and good, but the curtains of the RV, to put it quite simply, DO NOT MOVE AN INCH as she willfully leaps from her perch.

Another scene is early on as Susan (again) confides to the group that she feels some sort of strange "vibrations" as concerns restless spirits. And Steve, standing next to her, completely breaks character and begins laughing at the ridiculousness of the dialogue, turning his head only enough to hide his laughter then looking around again to reveal a big, dopey smile on his face. This isn't breaking the fourth wall - this is taping a "kick me" sign on the fourth wall's back.

There's even a note-worthy moment where all four of our main perpetrators pile into Excalibur and drive...and drive...and drive for even longer that our protagonists in another like-made film you may have heard of: Manos: The Hands Of Fate. I'm not kidding even a little bit. It's several minutes of driving and that's it. The only distraction is a clump of dirt that flips up onto the film and stubbornly stays on the bottom of the screen at least as long as the driving sequence (seven minutes tops). Suffice it to say the dirt onscreen is the most entertaining presence until it abruptly disappears, leaving a wide, gaping hole in our hearts and our lives after it departs.

As far as direction and writing, we can blame Malanowski for flat, static, slap-your-camera-on-a-tripod-and-step-back direction. But it was a combination of he and the two female leads who concocted the scenes, words and interactions that we see onscreen. Looking at the whole thing, it's hard to believe that this WASN'T made in the late Seventies. Having come out in 1981, it looks for all the world, in terms of clothing, hair, footwear, stoner-looking dudes stumbling about and all of one big honking Winnebago as the vehicle of choice, this might as well have been a feature struck in a Seventies time warp that couldn't wait to erupt from its time capsule and be discovered.

Well, for all the junk I've been talking on this film, it's hard to believe that I actually like Night Of Horror, isn't it? But I do: something this willfully dumb, earnest and so bald-facedly entertaining in the face of its shortcomings makes the viewer pay attention to the story just enough so as to find themselves swept up in the dream-like badness of the thing. Night of Horror plays like a psychotic, stunted passion play for people who like to see scrawny bushy-haired guys crack up, women jump out of their seats inside immobile RVs, Civil War re-enactments pop up out of nowhere and bars made entirely out of paneling from your parents' living rooms.

Being as small a film as it was, it may have made back its $4000 (yes: FOUR THOUSAND DOLLAR) budget. Then again, it may not have, either. Who knows; sometimes people just don't know how to appreciate what's right there in front of them. How to appreciate the little things in life. The small stuff. America in miniature.

This is the world of Night of Horror. Of course it may not be the boat you wish to set sail on the sea of horror in - then again, the first leg of the Titanic's maiden launch was probably a lot of fun until it hit the iceberg, too.

No really; I like this movie!