The Night Brings Charlie

I really like slasher movies,but this one is truly awful.The acting is lame,the script is bad,and the atmosphere is non-existent.The plot is as follows:a deformed gardener Charlie Puckett slaughters people in a small American town.That's right-this is the plot.Very original,eh!"The Night Brings Charlie" isn't even gory enough-if the film ain't gonna be scary,at least they should make it bloody.Avoid this cheap piece of trash at all costs.If you want to see some good slasher flicks check out "Madman","The Burning","The Prowler","Just Before Dawn" or "Humongous"- just don't waste your precious time with this worthless piece of garbage.

I rented this movie because I was browsing through the horror movie section for those movies that no one's heard of and could be a possible gem. I saw this and, since I'm a fan of violence and gore, I got it. It got the rating of EM which means: Extremely Mature. Thinking that this rare and high rating was totally meant for violence and everything else, I got it. The warning on the box said: Extreme Violence, Extreme Langauge, and Nudity. The "extreme violence" struck my fancy. The movie ended being a pretty tame slasher flick. It had one or two gory scenes but I've seen worse in a PG-13 movie. Of course the amount of gore in a movie isn't all that counts, right? You have plot also. Well, the plot was boring and there nothing really special about it. Don't rent it. I speak the truth. I can't imagine how someone could really enjoy it to the point where they say: "I'm gonna rent that again." It had it's moments where it kept you going but I'm never going to see that film again.

I'm not a big fan of slasher flicks as a genre, but even by the standards of low-low-budget exploitation, this one is really lame. Even on a nudity-and-gore level, it's incredibly boring (there is some of both, but it's all sort of...meh). Before the home video revolution, it might not even have been released theatrically (though it might have; after all, *Plan 9 From Outer Space* played in theaters). There is precisely one good (and competently-delivered) line in the entire movie; I assume they stole it from somewhere.

The acting is among the worst I have ever seen. I mean, even Ed Wood had a couple of competent actors, and the rest tended to be ludicrously hammy, which can be fun to watch. Anyway, most of his actors could pretty much pass as literate. Here, those who don't read their lines like cigar-store Indians sound like they learned them phonetically. And this film does have one distinction: it manages to be badly underplotted for most of the movie, then laughably overplotted for the ending.

(Update: I should have singled out the actress playing the receptionist as an exception. She is by no means wooden. Not that she's good, but she certainly isn't wooden.)

Even the worst slasher flicks are generally good for a few Puritan meditations on their grotesque offensiveness, but with this one, there doesn't even seem to be anything there to work up a moral outrage about.

And you know the funniest thing? They clearly expected to make a sequel!

It's so bad and boring that it actually becomes fascinating in a weird way. I sat enrapt through much of the video wondering why anyone would go to the bother of making it.

Murders start happening in a small Texas town where the heads of the victims are taken. The cops are investigating and Charlie turns out to be suspect # 1. I know that might sound interesting, but this amateurish early 90s horror flick isn't as good as it sounds. As well the sub-par acting brings this down. Not worth your time seeking out this rare horror movie.

In the tiny town of Pakoe (pronounced Pak-oh-wee), a masked maniac is pruning the pitiful population of 1251 by sawing the heads off teenagers. Could the killer possibly be hulking, disfigured tree-surgeon Charlie (Chuck Whiting), whose arrival in town just happens to have coincided with the spate of grisly murders? Well, duh! This isn't called 'The Night Brings Charlie' just for the fun of it. Of course, this being a dumb early-'90s slasher, the local sheriff and his men are utterly inept, remaining oblivious to any clues until late in the day, meaning that quite a few heads roll before the end credits do.

Director Tom Logan opens his film with a buxom, blonde teenager arriving home after a date, but kills her off before she can get inside and take a shower (boo!); her headless body is found the next morning by a paperboy (whose shocked reaction is priceless), but the killer's gruesome handiwork remains off-screen. With a missed opportunity for some gratuitous female nudity and a complete lack of splatter, it proves a rather disappointing way to start a slasher.

Thankfully, Logan soon sets about rectifying the matter, and before long he has delivered a spot of graphic violence (a bloody throat slashing and decapitated corpse) and what must be one of the most pointless (but welcome) shower scenes in any horror film, more than making up for his oversight at the beginning: as a busty babe busily soaps herself up, the killer loiters menacingly on the other side of the shower glass, before eventually slinking away leaving the girl totally unharmed (and very clean). The director also successfully ticks off quite a few genre clichés, with dumb teenagers ignoring common sense, an obnoxious jerk who likes to jump out and scare girls for a laugh, a totally unnecessary nightmare sequence, and creepy phone-calls from the killer.

From the halfway mark, there is a noticeable loss of momentum—the film becomes mired in dull police procedure and the script tries to be a little too clever for its own good with an extremely convoluted twist—but Logan picks things up again for the fun final act in which a guy has his (rubber) hand skewered by shears, a trio of bikers meet the business end of an axe, and the killer finally sets his sights on Jenny (Aimee Tenaglia), teenage step-daughter of town coroner Walt (Joe Fishback), pursuing her with a chainsaw, the power-tool of choice for any discerning movie maniac (even one whose messed-up face is the result of a chainsaw accident).