Le meurtrier de minuit

Other than a couple of fairly jumpy moments, this is about as bad as it gets... poor plot, script and acting - and not at all scary. That's an hour and a half of my life I won't get back!

This thriller kept gore and sex to the minimum and tried to blend the detective story with supernatural ;add a "pattern" (which the slayer follows) ,the kind of stuff Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen lent credibility too , and was brilliantly treated in one of the best thrillers of the nineties "seven" .But Peter Sullivan who not only directed but also wrote the screenplay in neither Christie nor Queen :his story has as many plot holes as Swiss Cheese , and its action is too hurried for comfort.

What the police and the judges were not able to do five years ago, Ashley Scott effortlessly did it. Single-handedly , cause ,although at the top of the bill ,Cuba Gooding Jr is only supporting ,and Chase "Longmire" Bailey is only an attentive escort , it's Scott who discovers the "clues". Like Demi Moore in "the juror" ,she might die (on the third day after the last murder) ,for a mysterious assassin is doing away with the members of the jury of a trial which took place five years ago. Her dead child is only a trick to justify the last scene ,which does not review the genre ;the professor and her 1% are here to give the de rigueur cultural alibi to a far-fetched story.

Entertaining at best;very average MTV film.

Defo an afternoon type film. The acting is pretty bad. The suspense it there though which is probably why I gave it a 4 rather than a 3 rating.

Lifetime adds it's touch to the supernatural thriller genre about former members of a jury who sentenced a man to death. One by one they start dying - is it a ghost or natural? It's moderately predictable in a reassuring lifetime way. It's also a bit weak especially in the romance part.

Ashley Scott is in a lot of LMN movies these days and she is a bit painful to watch at times. There is an inadvertently funny part with James Hong. Poor Cuba, what are you doing in this kind of TV movie? Overall okay for a relaxing watch if you just want to unwind and switch off your brain for a couple of hours.

Well SUMMONED is by no means as suspenseful nor as cleverly written as the 1967 Wait Until Dark. I compared the two to identify what is a really suspenseful and great movie and what is not. By now you have guessed that SUMMONED did not do it for me.

Cuba Gooding Jr is credited as one of the stars but he plays a minor part and a dumb cop to boot. So if you are watching Summoned because you admire Cuba Gooding Jr's body of work, you will be even more disappointed.

The two main actors Ashley Scott and Bailey Chase do a pretty good job trying to carry the movie but no matter how good the acting is, a poor script will create a poor movie, thus my 3 star rating. The plot surrounds a convicted murderer who is put to death and shortly after his execution the jurors start dying under mysterious circumstances.

Most irritating for me was the continuous use of the violins as the background music to try and hold our suspense. If you fast forward and skip to the last 15 minutes of the movie you will get the gist of the plot and find out who the killer is. Not a very creative movie and not one that will hold most movie fans heart in their throat.....at least not like Wait Until Dark does.