Lost After Dark

I pretty much agree with the others here (4 so far) The director did a nice job of setting up the characters and the general feeling of the era pretty well, but ultimately and unfortunately there really just wasn't much of a story to go along with it.

The ironic thing is that usually it is SPECIFICALLY the acting itself that is so atrocious in these low-budget Horror films and many times completely ruins what could have been a good story (please see my review of the recent Gawd-Awful 'HONEYMOON' for example) But... in this case, the characters and the acting itself were just fine for the type of film it is, BUT everything else just didn't really add up to much. So, in this case it turned out kind of backwards from the way many other films seem to go...

As mentioned by others, Robert Patrick was good in his role and the girl's Dad was just about right. Too bad... because almost ALWAYS, it is precisely the terrible acting or characters that are so grating in films like this, but these ones here are actually fairly decent compared to most. So, it leaves you feeling that you really would have liked to see them in the context of a much better story, but that is just the way it seemed to turn out, in my lowly and wretched opinion.

Heh... I kind of feel that my REVIEW is rather shallow too, but quite honestly, there just isn't much more to say. I gave it a '5' only because I thought the setting, characters, and actors were pretty decent, otherwise the story overall would have gotten less...

So, basically.... move along home... nothing to see here...

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

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.

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.

It was an okay cheap horror film. Nothing great and nothing new to see. I won't spoil it, but the first death was shocking; I didn't expect that. The kills were okay. Even though Toby wasn't the main character, I was surprised he turned out to be so likable. They don't usually make a character the audience will care about in these types of movies.\ Robert Patrick's character was silly. I don't know if he was hurting for money, or he just wanted to be in a horror film.

The bad guy was stupid. You've seen his sort of "can't die bad guy" in multiple cheap horror films.

I gave this a 4-star rating. If you must watch all the slasher films out there, give this a viewing, but don't expect much. However, there are horror films that are far worse than this.