Movie Review: Dead Night (2017)

July 24, 2018

Written by DanXIII

Daniel XIII; the result of an arcane ritual involving a King Diamond album, a box of Count Chocula, and a copy of Swank magazine, is a screenwriter, director, producer, actor, artist, and reviewer of fright flicks…Who hates ya baby?

Dead Night opens in the year 1961 as strange hooded figures abduct a young woman and impregnate her with their demon seed…which goes about as well as one would expect (I mean really, has “raped by a monster to sire it’s love child” ever had a happy ending?) Flash forward to 2015, and a dysfunctional family (and one friend) heads out in the family truckster to visit a remote cabin, under which a large quantity of buried iron is said to exist…why is that important? Because said deposit can supposedly render a new age cure for the family’s ailing patriarch. Of course this location is still home to those creepy creatures mentioned above, and they’ve been rubbin’ up on some corkscrew cocoon thing gettin’ it’s tentacles all a-twitter. We soon learn…via a true crime television show replete with cheesy re-enactments and commercials for a local politician, Leslie Bison (the legendary Barbara Crampton) that the matriarch of the fam, Casey (Brea Grant) is an ax murdering psycho and offed everyone in the cabin (except the aforementioned friend who has never been found)…but as the show progresses, we see the actual events unfold…and that politician, well let’s just say she has a few skeletons in her closet (Don’t they all fiends? The times…the times…) and what lies in the woods is an evil as old as time…
I’m gonna come clean with you creeps; when I was handed this thing to slap a revoltin’ review upon, I thought it was going to be another one of those lame ass psychological thrillers that for me are about as exciting to lay putrid peepers on as a test pattern…but boy-fuckin’-howdy was I wrong! This is a demented flick filled with strange creatures, mind-bending takes on reality, and a fantastic visual motif in the utilization of the “true crime’ program…the secrets of which is simply surrealist fright flick film making at it’s finest! Along with that we get absolutely rad-ass practical gore and transformation effects, great performances (stand-outs being Crampton’s paradigm changing role, Kay D’Arcy as a granny with a past, and Daniel Roebuck as the host of the show within the film), and a trope-smashing cabin in the woods story line from co-writer (along with Irving Walker)/director Brad Baruh!
As for the negatives…you just shut yer mouths boils and ghouls; this one was a solid horror biz romp through and through and never faltered for your’s cruelly!
I’m not even sure I can praise Dead Night enough; it’s a gory fever dream of a film that is sure to satisfy horror hounds looking for a new, demented take on a tried and true fright flick concept!
 

 


 
For More on Dead Night from Horror Fuel head here!

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