Steineded
How sad is this?
Stevecorp
Don't listen to the negative reviews
Invaderbank
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
Aubrey Hackett
While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
O2D
I saw that AMC was running this at 4:45 am today so I stayed up to check it out. Another in a long line of terrible decisions. Not only is the movie terrible, AMC had the nerve to show some stupid 15 minute compressed version that they put together. The only movie that American Movie Classics played in a week and they couldn't run the whole thing. Unfortunately I decided that I needed to see the whole thing and now I can never get that time back. At one point a guy says "She can wait, we can't. I have doctor's reports to fill out!' What?? The only thing I think I understood was that the guy's sister wanted to have sex with him and I'm not even sure about that. I have seen a lot of bad movies and this makes most of them look pretty good.
billoneil2
Sinister Cinema carries this title and like IMDb, they insist it contains "axe murders galore." In fact, there is not one single axe murder in the entire film. The first murder is by shotgun and the rest are by kitchen knife and filmed in such a tame and un-graphic way as to make it sometimes unclear whether the murder actually took place.This is an extremely low budget and amateur attempt at a murder mystery. Probably due to budgetary limitations (and the film maker's inexperience) it is shot so thin one can easily see the difficulties the editor had putting it together.While I can forgive the lack of funds it is harder to excuse the script. You will know who the guilty party is almost immediately. Throughout the film, clues are presented in such an obvious and over-stated manner as to leave no doubt in your mind. Consequently, there is no "big surprise" when the killer's identity is revealed.Another problem is the premise itself. The movie is clearly aimed at skirt-chasing heterosexual males who presumably accept a virtually all-female cast constantly trying to seduce the male lead. The first 14 minutes of the film are a tedious exercise in redundancy and implausibility, as our hero is flirted with by no less than six wannabe vamps.All these things aside, there are some pleasures to be had here. Lee Phillips, while completely wasted in such a poorly written role, nevertheless is talented enough to make his scenes plausible. A young James Farentino also shows promise in an early part as a thug. Although made in 1963, there is an abundance of late 1950s mood and style on display, which would completely evaporate by the following year when the producers made "Horror of Party Beach." A roughly-hewn, crude movie likely to disappoint you if you're searching for a forgotten-gem type film.
sol
****SPOILERS**** Suffering from a sever case of post-traumatic shock syndrome due to his experiences in the Korean War Elliot Freeman, Lee Philips, took up painting to calm his already shattered nerves. Becoming a hermit Elliot saw no one but those young and shapely women who posed for him at his out of the way home in the wilds of Connecticut.One of Elliot's models Delores Martello, Kaye Elhardt, got a lot more intimate with Elliot then posing for him in the nude. Delores had a one night stand with the highly sensitive and high strung artist and accused him of knocking her up. Elliot knowing that Delores was full of it, she had a number of boyfriends on the side, refused t marry her and threw Delores out of his studio. It's not that long after Delores was given the heave ho by Elliot that she was found brutally murdered in her furnished apartment.A prime suspect in Delores' murder Elliot is not the only person who suspected in killing her. Delores' ex-boyfriend leather-jacket biker and collage laundry boy Charlie Perone, James Farentino, is also a person of interest in Delores' death. It seems that Charlie had it in for both Delores and Elliot since she dumped him for the great painter. It was just a few days before her death that Charlie confronted Elliot and Delores at the Pine Tree Inn where Elliot almost killed him.With Charlie having an air-tight alibi his girlfriend Slivia, Silvia Miles, who swears that he spent the night with her at the time that Delores was murdered it's now Elliot who has a lot of explaining to do to the police. While all this is going on another young woman who had the hots for the handsome and sensitive, as well as troubled, artist Alice St. Clair, Lorraine Rogers, is found murdered in a nearby lake! In this case Elliot & Charlie both prime suspects in Alices death can't come up with any alibi's to where they were at the time of her murder!The movie "Midnight Violence" keeps you guessing to who the killer really is always showing him from the neck on down. wearing a Bogie-like trench-coat and paratrooper combat boots the killer is always stalking women who have anything romantically to do with Elliot. It's when Elliot's sept-sister Lynn, Margot Hartmen, who together with the Freeman family attorney Adrian Benedict, Shepperd Strudwick, want to get Elliot badly needed psychiatric treatment that the killer goes into overdrive and thus overplays his hand.psycho-like slasher film with the killer so obsessed in his fascination with Elliot that he was actually the reason for Elliot's mental breakdown. This happened at the beginning of the movie in a quail hunt that Elliot participated in after he came back from Korea. Charlie for his part turned out to be not only a man who couldn't, despite his animal-like Stanley Kowalski persona, hold on to his women but who disrespect the only one, Silvia, who could keep him from being arrested by the cops by sticking to his hair-brained alibi. There's also, in a rare dramatic Dirty Harry-like role, future comedian Dick Van Patten as the tough as nails and no BS police detective Lt. Palmer. Lt. Plamer despite his great dislike of that macho swaggering creep Charlie Perone risked his life in saving Perone's neck when he, trying to escape from the law, jumped into the lake with a bullet lodged in his leg.We finally get to see who the killer really is but it's done in such a confusing style, with a double-twist ending, with him going into a whole song and dance routine that you soon lose interest in him together with his confusing movie ending cock & bull story.
bensonmum2
Violent Midnight (Psychomania) is a nice little film in the Psycho tradition that, for the most part, manages to overcome the handicap of a very limited budget. If you can get past the spotty acting and the less than stellar production values, you'll discover an interesting early slasher. The script is far smarter than many films of this type. Violent Midnight actually manages to have the police believably cast their suspicion on two different characters at the same time that the viewer knows to be innocent. Lesser scripts struggle to generate enough credible evidence and circumstances to suggest one person, let alone two, is a believable suspect. And when the killer is finally revealed, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I would have never guessed the outcome.In some ways Violent Midnight was ahead of its time. Today's audiences might find it incredibly tame, but I would guess that 1964 audiences found the sex and violence in Violent Midnight shocking. Personally, I was amazed at how effective and provocative some of the racier scenes were. As for the violence, though nothing explicit is shown as in the Psycho tradition, there's a fair amount of blood for this type of film.Finally, I got a real kick out of the cast. My favorite cast member has to be the relatively soft and sometimes goofy Dick Van Patten in the role of the tough, no nonsense cop. Talk about working against stereotype! And to my surprise, he pulls it off. He's easily the best "actor" in the bunch.