Lost After Dark

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

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.

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 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...

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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