Dead Night

Apparently this film underwent heavy re editing just before release. As such it suffers with a nonsense story . The basic premise is a family of four along with a friend of he daughter travel to a remote cabin in the woods with the promise of the areas holistic properties . Once there they seemingly discover an unconscious woman in the snow, and take her back which leads to dire supernatural consequences. On the plus side, it's beautifully shot. The lighting , camera work , sound design and music are all top notch. It's quickly paced and gets straight into the action. There are some truly creepy creature designs, practical gore and violent kills. The cast does a mostly good job, with one notable exception of a scene where the mother deals with whats happened to her family . On the negative side, the film does a poor job of guiding the audience about whats going on in regards to the supernatural elements. Characters just seem to show up out of nowhere, very little or no explanation of what creatures are, their purpose or what they are actually needing victims for. We get a brief exposition dump in regards to Barbara Crampton's character. Also a pet peev of mine, is where at the or near the beginning of a movie, it will show you scenes of what happens at the end of the story and then goes back in time and tell the story via a kind of flashback. It completely undercuts tension as you already know the fate of most characters, and therefore you are just waiting for them to die. This movie kind of does that , by having scenes involving a true crime style TV show giving you the 'official' version of whats happened. Even though events play out differently in the movie compared to whats shown on this faux TV show , it still reveals characters fates and therefore the same issue. I feel in an attempt to be clever the film makers have done themselves an injustice, and would have benefited in telling the story in a more traditional narrative and spent more time setting up more context for whats going on. However what we do see on screen is well done and great effects and shot really well

That is all not sure what kind of "spoiler" could be written about this movie

I watched it last night and was pleasantly surprised with how bloody/gory the film is. the gore is 100% practical and it's fantastic/well done. Barbara Crampton is excellent as an antagonist (that's not a spoiler since it's in the trailer). Brea Grant is very good too and kick ass as the mother trying to save her family. my only complaint about it is the storyline is incredibly stupid and makes little to no sense. it also has an idiotic fake tv show (a Dateline/Crime story type show on the actual family in the film) within the movie which i hated. LOL. but again the blood/gore is so full on that it makes up for it. you have decapitations, arms cut off, branches stabbed into eyes/faces, etc. etc. there's even a full on transformation complete with those special fx facial bladder things (like in THE HOWLING). bad storyline aside this movie is a fun 80's style film that fans of practical FX gore/blood will get a kick out of!

Well, where to begin?! I have to say that the trailer looked decent and it pretty much goes downhill from there. No real direction or point to it. Things are not really explained though it's obvious they were hoping for a sequel.

The biggest thing that ruins this movie is the true crime documentary style show that pops in throughout the movie. There really is no point to it as it doesn't lead to anything and not only that but it tells you what's going to happen (mostly) and who dies and who survives about 15 minutes into the movie so from that point on there really isn't any point to continue watching the movie.

A bad horror movie has pretty much one thing going for it and that's trying to figure out who dies and how. Take that away and you might as well watch paint dry.

There's nothing here to redeem this mess of a movie so put this movie in the "never watch" pile.

If you asked me what this movie was about I'm not sure I could tell you. The acting is good so it's definitely not for lack of trying on the actors' part. The tv show within the movie is absolutely pointless. It distracts from what's going on, not that it matters because nothing is ever explained. It's like the writers had five or six good ideas and tried to stick them all into one movie, absolutely failing in execution. Surely someone in production at some point could tell this movie was going to suck because of the plot. I just wished they'd have spoken up and saved me about 90 minutes. I love horror movies but after watching so many terrible ones lately I'm about to give up on them.