Midnight is a classic example of a short film stretched way beyond its natural limits. We see them stealing from a supermarket, mooching about in the woods, encountering racist rednecks in a bar and none of this really adds that much to the story.
Things pick up a bit in the closing stages but by then it’s too late as we’ve spent far too long following the not-at-all-exciting exploits of the young runaway and her new friends. There’s no excuse for the sluggish pacing either. Which is no excuse at all for the lack or originality on Russo’s part.
Curiously, Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre recycles some the plot elements from Midnight (the idea that local law enforcement are part of the insane family at the heart of things). A pair of brutal police officers, Luke (Greg Besnak) and Abraham (John Amplas) murder Hank and Tom and turn out to be part of an extended family of Satanists who are looking for sacrifices that they hope will revive the rotting corpse of the family matriarch.īadly acted by a largely unknown cast (Tierney and Amplas – the eponymous Martin in Romero’s 1978 film – are the only “names”) largely made up of local amateurs and poorly paced, Midnight (also known as Backwoods Massacre) makes no bones about its spiritual roots, tossing out references to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre willy nilly. Along the way the pick up Baptist preacher Reverend Carrington (Bob Johnson) and his adult daughter Sandra (Lachele Carl) both of who are subsequently murdered. Young runaway Nancy Johnson (Melanie Verlin) on the run from her abusive step-father (Lawrence Tierney) hitches a lift with two young men, Hank (Charles Jackson) and Tom (John Hall) and they head out into the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania. When he wasn’t writing novels he was adapting them into films like Midnight, based on his 1980 book, an ambitious but dull attempt to take bits and pieces pillaged from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and give them a post- The Exorcist (1973) “satanic panic” spin. Russo was writing novels like Return of the Living Dead (1977 – filmed in 1985), The Majorettes (1979 – filmed in 1986) and Limb to Limb (1981). When he wasn’t messing around with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which he co-wrote, John A.
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