Against the Night

Watch if you dare, you won't get the wasted minutes back in your life. Sometimes bad is good, this is not one of those times. Stupid people in abandon jail, you know what's going to happen. The twists all through the movie couldn't save it.....it's bad. You've been warned.

For a low budget modern horror movie, the production quality is great, the acting is good enough, and the premise works.

Where does it go wrong then?

First, it's not scary. There is no suspense and the movie takes itself seriously, so there should be some.

Second, the death sequences are dry and lame. The screen will go black and someone will randomly go missing. That's it. No payoff, no terror.

Third, they rely on the found footage aspect when it's not needed. The a/v is well done otherwise and this does not make it more effective. The majority of the movie ends up being a plain black screen about 25 minutes in.

This could have been successful, but falls completely flat.

And notwithstanding the "circle jerk" that the user review forum usually is this is a decent movie. It starts of annoyingly enough but gets good in the second half had has a BAM ending.

If all of them had died in the first five minutes, this would have made a very short film, and I would have given it a higher rating. A positive is the location of the film, in the abandoned Holmsburg Prison making for an interesting set. The most annoying character was Hank, who considered himself a film maker, and wanted to film his friends (and pay each $200) in the prison, expecting to find ghosts, or so he told them. So it is a lot of night camera work (green scenes) and flashlights and darkness, and things that go bump in the night. One soon does not care for any of the characters, and Hank seems to have rigged the whole scenario up, including faking his death. There are a lot of hysterics and few show any real 'smarts' in dealing with what is happening. My rating may be too high, but I know which movies I have rated lower, and this doesn't quite sink to that level.

But this film is a real stinker. Nothing redeeming whatsoever about any of the characters. Directionless. Took me multiple attempts to watch it all the way through. Don't waste your time. As the other reviewer mentioned it comes across as a terrible Grave Encounters ripoff.