Lost After Dark

Set in Michigan in 1984 this movie pays homage to the 1980s style American slasher horror genre and stars Robert Patrick of X-Files and True Blood fame.

In typical US teen fashion some kids steal a school bus in order to take a 'secret' getaway to a hunting cabin in the woods to party, unfortunately they run out of gas in the middle of nowhere (surprise, surprise!). The situation soon takes a nasty turn when they trespass through an old house that they believe to be abandoned, and are soon stalked and murdered by a cannibalistic killer.

Lost After Dark is just an average slasher horror, bringing in nothing fresh or exciting, and despite the seemingly silly inclusion of Robert Patrick's annoying character, it's actually not THAT bad of a movie. However, it does get a bit stupid and predictable towards the end.

Lost After Dark is still worth a watch for those who enjoy 80s slasher style horrors.

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The director is competent, the actors are mostly doing a fair enough job and the gore effects are probably what you would expect from a low-budget slasher referencing the 80s. But the script is bad enough to outweigh the good, significantly.

It seems that people are nowadays so used to movies being constructed by formula, retelling the same old crap, over and over, that they immediately consider a movie "smart" when it does something a little different from the others. Yes, the movie does have a few minor surprises. But other than that, most of the tiring clichés and overused tropes are still there. None of the "victims" do anything intelligent or reasonable. The killer could be no more generic, the story no less interesting.

There are a few well shot and creepy visuals, but those were, unfortunately, not the focus of the movie and thus were neglected in favor of uninspired slasher action.

Slasher movie set in 1984. A group of high school friends steal a school bus and head off for a weekend away but when the vehicle runs out of fuel in the middle of nowhere they seek refuge in a seemingly abandoned old farm house. Needless to say somebody is still living there, and they have homicidal and cannibalistic tendencies! This is clearly meant to be an homage to the slasher movies of the late 1970's/early 1980's. In fact by 1984 the period known as the Golden Age of the slasher boom was pretty much over. Anyway I like the idea but sadly it is unconvincing, to me it looks like a film made in 2015 trying but failing to look 1984. It is simply impossible to replicate the feeling of all those great movies from the 80's, a period that I recall with much fondness. Plus there was no CGI then. Robert Patrick is in the cast, which is great, but doesn't help the 1984 cause. He was in Terminator 2 back in 1991, where he looked much younger than he does in Lost After Dark, which is set 7 years before T2, But that's just a personal thing for me! As a slasher movie it is pretty decent, we get all the stereotypical characters but a curve ball is delivered when one of the characters, who I wrongly assumed would make it to the finale, is one of the first to be killed out of the group. Apart from the obligatory opening kill the first half is pretty much gore free, a tad slow. But the second half makes up for this with plenty of gory deaths. Surprisingly no nudity. I picked this up dirt cheap on DVD and glad I did so, certainly give it another shot.

Pros: Robert Patrick is getting work

Cons: unoriginal, so dark you can't see most of it, generic, can't decide if it's meta, trying to be 80s with zero charm, cannot care about the characters, generic stereotypes, music is bad.

I've got to say, as someone who grew up in the 80's watching almost every horror movie that came out (BIIIG thank you to sharing a room with my sister, who was 7 years older...) when I saw that they were calling this an homage to those movies I was very leery. One hour in I decided to, after years of using IMDb, make an account just to review the movie!! From the cheesy cliché characters to the cliché plot line.. Totally brought me back to those awful movies my sister would force me to watch growing up. The only thing I didn't really like was the overly played 'Nam vet (yes, also an awesome cliché!!!) Mr.C played by the sadly underused Robert Patrick! All in all, actually not to bad of a movie