Dead of the Nite

I watched Dead of the Nite at the Gold Coast Film Festival in Australia and enjoyed the film from the Hitchcock style opening credits all the way to the great twist at the end.

The film is an unusual combination of traditional filmmaking and the found footage style. It works very well as it pulls you from one storyline to the other without taking you too far out of caring for the characters.

The best thing about the film is Tony Todd. Although he's only in it for about 15 minutes he steals every scene he's in and his voice truly is legendary!

The young cast are OK, though at times it seems a little am-dram, and the night vision can grate on you a little, but the cutting to the traditional daytime stuff helps break it up. Also thankfully it's not all shaky cams that make you sick. The pacing is thoughtful and builds tension, and though the director uses a few cliché tactics to create the jumps, they still work very effectively.

Overall I gave it a 10/10 (which is based on the fact they made it for only $20,000) but it is more as 7/10 though still worth a watch when it comes out on DVD.

I really wanted to like this and get into it but this is truly one of the worst films I have seen. I got maybe 45mins - 1 hour in before giving up and deciding to write that hour of my life off as a mistake.

The acting is weak, some of the camera work is weird considering we are meant to be watching camcorder footage, the chief detective guy is laughable and always angry for some bizarre reason and the story just doesn't go anywhere.

Stay away from this at all costs, it really is not worth your time at all, but feel free to partake in some other fun activities like the following instead:

• watch paint dry - watch a puddle evaporate - count your feet

An important reason for me, to get the movie and watch it was Tony Todd. He is always so magnificent and when he is in a movie even in a small part, you always talk about his role. I really love some actors like him, Robert England etc and I really want to see them again, having an appearance in a movie that is more than a few minutes.

So back to this movie: a film crew goes to a haunted house for their internet show. The caretaker (Tony Todd) warns them about the house and that the doors during the night will be locked. The film team doesn't listen and they want to stay in the house during the night. Alone… in the dark... In the night … no one can hear them…

Lucky for us, the footage was retrieve and so we can watch what happened to them. I am really tired of the 'found footage' type of movies. When it was done for the first time you had fun watching something completely different. Now so many movies are done like this. Some are good like Rec (2007), but most of them

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What started as a promising, if unoriginal, British slant on the now common theme of "Ghost Hunters meet evil spirits in a Haunted House" (think Grave Encounters), quickly gave way to a rather humdrum plot that was very disappointing.

Despite the presence of Tony "Candyman" Todd, the acting seemed at best to be that of a provincial amateur dramatic group (think The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society), but not as interesting. "Characters" quickly revert to stereotype. Todd tries to make up for this by hammily overacting, although he does manage to steal every scene he's in (not difficult).

The "police station" scenes are wholly unconvincing and the "policemen" laughable. With numerous bog-standard crime fare on telly and in films, surely it wouldn't be too difficult to make these scenes reasonably realistic? Er, no.

The "twist" in the plot is hardly surprising, although the reason for it is strangely bizarre. The denouement comes as a blessing for various reasons. I can't remember welcoming the closing titles in a film more readily. Not good. Avoid.

Sometimes it is a good idea to take heed and observe the low rating of a movie on IMDb as a clear indicator of not to watch this movie. However, I figured that I would still give "Dead of the Nite" a chance, especially since Tony Todd was in it.

I shouldn't have taken the warning serious...

This was one of the more boring, uneventful and pitiful horror movies that I have had the misfortune to bear witness to in a long, long time. And it didn't help the movie one inch that it was presented in a sort of 'found footage' way, you know with the questionable and shaky camera that is all over the place.

Furthermore, it didn't really help the movie either that it had no proper and solid storyline to sell the movie. "Dead of the Nite" was a shallow husk of a movie trying to pass off as being a horror movie.

The acting in this abysmal movie was questionable. Sure, some people were doing fair enough jobs, but they had next to nothing to work with. While others were just appalling to witness on the screen. And even Tony Todd seemed to have lost his mojo in this movie. He was there physically, but mentally he seemed a million miles away.

I didn't even make it to the halfway point of the movie before I had to give up out of pure frustration, sheer boredom and complete disbelief that movie like this still find a way into production and more scarily so onto the market.

There was nothing interesting about "Dead of the Nite", aside from the title. But even there they managed to mess it up; "Nite", seriously? They couldn't even be bothered to spell the word properly? If you enjoy a good horror movie, then "Dead of the Nite" is definitely not the movie for you. However, if you enjoy a movie with no purpose and no entertainment value, then by all means do check out "Dead of the Nite".

I am forced to rate this movie a mere one out of ten stars. Stay well clear of this one, folks.