I have to admit having gotten a real kick out of Joel Bender's MIDNIGHT KISS, easily one of the strangest and most entertaining of the 1990's home video era of vampire horror cheapies. The natural appeal of a sexy vampire movie made sense to the low budget film producers looking to feed the frenzy of the masses for their weekly movie rentals after the surprise hits of films like VAMP and THE LOST BOYS. Most of the resulting films are trashy, cheap, bloody, sleazy, and therefore quite popular amongst bad film aficionados like myself. This is one of the better efforts that I've seen.
It's an odd little turkey of a movie too because it aspires to have a message for viewers about female empowerment, the evils of misogyny & chauvinism, gender politics, and a general condemnation of sexual violence directed at women. All good messages and horror films often serve as subversive platforms for social causes. But the film has a peculiar habit of having it's cake while eating it too as it lectures us on workplace sexual harassment during a visit to a strip bar while the topless titty dancers gyrate in the background. It's heroine lady cop also goes through a transformation during the film, evolving from a frumpy professional police woman into a sexually vivacious bloodsucker Goth sex babe decked out in fishnets + leathers. If that's feminism I like it.
The vampire business is actually secondary to the film's central message, which is that men are creeps by nature and some can be downright dangerous. Every guy in the film is a jerk, at least for a few scenes, and the plot even throws in a multi-ethnic gang beating of a homeless person to demonstrate that the evil of male patriarchal power structures knows no boundary of race, color, or creed. The few noble males in the cast who try to stand up for decency end up dead or worse, and the female characters are all victims, vixens, or militant would-be feminists like our hero, a rape squad detective assigned to a slew of brutal murders where the victims were sexually assaulted as well. She's more fun at parties after she is transformed into a half-vampire hottie, that's for sure.
As others have pointed out the vampire is the most interesting character in the film, not only does he have a sense of humor but is surprisingly hip, even ditching his coffin for a body bag in the film's amusing contribution to the history of vampire lore. He's got the angsty Gothic nightclubbing punk rocker look down pat and gets to hiss a few decent one liners. The writers made a wise decision by deciding to totally ignore the character's history and reduce him to a slasher monster who just happens to be a vampire. He's not a person, he's a menace who takes glee in who & what he is: finding out how he got that way would only have served to muddy the waters. But the film's standout section for me involved an ingeniously staged sequence where somebody chases their cat around a tiny, cramped apartment. Hehe, Keety keety!! ;] Whoever made this movie was thinking, though perhaps a bit too much at times.
This film also has some hilariously over-the-top gore sequences which are not to be missed by horror film buffs, my favorite being the after effects of a shotgun blast depicted by a halo of orange/pinkish frothy mush surrounding the head of the chalked outline of a murder victim. It's that kind of a sly, sick, and deeply warped sense of humor that sets this one a notch or two above the rest, even with all the female empowerment messages. There's a modestly priced DVD available showing the unrated 86 minute print. Buy one, and watch it with friends while drinking beer.
7/10
