Ten To Midnight (1983)

[Nelson Swillie]

Someone mentioned this in the thread I created for the Death Wish novel, so I thought I'd have a crack at it. Before I dive in, though, here's what Roger Ebert has to say.

This is a scummy little sewer of a movie, a cesspool that lingers sadistically on shots of a killer terrifying and killing helpless women, and then is shameless enough to end with an appeal to law and order. The movie lingers on the faces of screaming women. It revels in its bloodbaths. Gore spurts all over the screen. The final sequence is so disgusting that I wrote the first sentence of this review in my mind while I was watching it. This movie indicates that Charles Bronson just doesn't care any more, and is just going through the motions for the money. I admired his strong, simple talent once. What is he doing in a garbage disposal like this?

I assume he didn't like it. This from the man who gave the original Last House on the Left (1972) one of its only good reviews, first time out. Anyway.

A lot of people, usually referring to the 'torture porn' sub-genre of cinema that has surfaced in recent years with the success of Eli Roth's Hostel and the Saw movies, claim that "films are getting more and more violent and sleazy and disgusting with each passing year", and are often heard to wonder out loud..."where will it all end?".

I've got news for them. It's already over.

It ended in the mid-eighties. Nihilism went mainstream and stayed there - witness the success of films like An American Werewolf in London (can you think of any modern horror movie having the sheer brass balls to visit graphic, bloody murder - perpetrated by drooling ghouls done up as Nazi stormtroopers - on a Jewish family, whose members include two sweet-faced children?), Death Wish II (which offered, to the daring, the most gratuitously offensive combination of pornographic titillation, prurient rape scenes, fascism and exploitation of the fears and prejudices of Joe Public ever to smudge a mainstream picture), Marathon Man (that dentist's chair torture sequence was cited in a contemporary British newspaper as a prime example of the increasing depravity of Tinseltown) and the Dino De Laurentiis-sponsored rape-revenge-sleaze epic Lipstick - and Hollywood effectively beat the zero-budget exploitationers at their own game. This cycle of sleazy, lurid, gratuitously scummy action thrillers and mean-spirited horror films (it speaks volumes that the 21st-century remakes of The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen and even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre couldn't hope to trump the originals in terms of sheer nastiness and shock value, despite ramping up the production values and adding CGI grue by the bucketload) finally spluttered out in the mid-eighties, concurrent with the rise of political correctness, and things have never been quite the same since.

So, hats off to 10 to Midnight, a Cannon Group (Messrs Golan and Globus to you) film which sees nothing wrong in gloating over the psychological and physical torture of nubile young women, revels in its taboo-busting spurts of blood, gutter language and defiantly right-wing stance, and offers the stone-faced Charles Bronson another opportunity to do what he does best...though it takes him a while to strap on his scum-kicking boots this time around. Roger Ebert hated it, of course - and, whilst I have to give him every possible scrap of credit for being one of the few critics to stand up and cheer Wes Craven's Last House On the Left on its first time out, I'm baffled by his humourless stance on the bad taste masterpiece that is Silent Night, Deadly Night and his scathing review of I Spit On Your Grave - and any film that includes an electric 'pocket pussy' and lines like "his knife has to be his penis" was never going to be one for the art lovers, but 10 to Midnight could never be accused of not delivering the goods...unless, of course, you watch the cut-to-ribbons, sanitized television version, in which case you'll probably be left wondering what all the fuss was about.

It's the sort of film you couldn't imagine being made these days (unless John Waters redrafted it as a goofy black comedy), drawing clear parallels with the Richard Speck murders and throwing in cheap jokes about stoners and coitus interruptus to keep the audience entertained, playing fast and loose with the parameters of taste and capping the whole gaudy spectacle with a memorably blunt show-down that's engineered, every last frame of it, to make the entire audience stand up and cheer. There's also bad eighties synth-driven rock to relish, Wilford Brimley offering understated support in what I like to call the 'John Vernon' role (i.e. the 'reliable character actor who sympathises with the bad-ass maverick cop but lacks the guts to go through with his reactionary rhetoric' role), some gorgeous gals (the scenes in the nurses' shared apartment occasionally resemble a softcore porn flick waiting to kick into a higher gear, and I just love the buxom brunette the killer makes a fumbled pass at in the cinema scene) and Gene Davis, making the most of a role that could be generously described as a 'career killer' - to put that into some perspective, I doubt even the king of the on-screen psychos, David Hess, would have wanted to dirty his hands playing this kind of creepy, socially-awkward, screaming, whimpering, sleazeball misfit. (Nicholas Worth probably would have had fun with it, though.)

In short, 10 to Midnight will take you back to a simpler time, when Bronson's name alone was a guaranteed box office draw, when Golan and Globus were cranking out unpolished but commercially viable flicks like this at least twice a week, and when a title didn't need to have anything to do with the movie as long as it sounded cool. And since the DVD probably won't cost you more than a few quid, why not hold your nose and dive in at the deep end?

Good bits...



Gene Davis (brother of Midnight Express star Brad) fails to get anywhere with drop-dead gorgeous Katrina Parish, whose only film this was. Why?



Seriously. Look at her. What a goddess.



Charles Bronson confronts the suspect with the immortal line "It's for JACKING OFF, isn't it?"



Lisa Eilbacher as Bronson's daughter. Kelly Preston (John Travolta's wife) is in there as well somewhere.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Katrina Parish

Oh wow!

This might actually be worth a wanking thread, for amazing screen actresses famous for one thing only. And it will give me an excuse to go on about Laurie Zimmer and Nancy Kyes from Assault on Precinct 13.

[Nelson Swillie]

Which, incidentally, was fucking terrible.

[Funcrusher]

Which, incidentally, was fucking terrible.

Assault on Precinct 13? How can anyone not like it? Anyone with a soul, anyway.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

There's no way I'm hanging around to read Nelson's opinions on the definitely-not-terrible Assault On Precinct 13. There's a chance he may be referring to the 2005 remake but if he means the original then oh god, we are not going there sunshine.

[Nelson Swillie]

John Carpenter is a good film-maker, but he has also made his fair share of utter bleb, at both ends of his career.

Dark Star? Quaint but be honest, it's still cheapskate arse fluid.

As for Assault On Precinct 13...

Night of the Living Dead rip-off with thugs rather than zombies.

I'd even rather watch Ghosts From Mars than this shit again. Or the Thing! Now that was a fucking awesome film.

[Funcrusher]

John Carpenter is a good film-maker, but he has also made his fair share of utter bleb, at both ends of his career.

Dark Star? Quaint but be honest, it's still cheapskate arse fluid.

As for Assault On Precinct 13...

Night of the Living Dead rip-off with thugs rather than zombies.

I'd even rather watch Ghosts From Mars than this shit again. Or the Thing! Now that was a fucking awesome film.

I've never been able to face watching Ghosts of Mars, but any Carpenter film up to and including The Thing is 100% solid gold to me. AOP13 is more of a rip-off of John Ford, if anything, albeit a brilliant one.

Edit - Dark Star is fun, and quite influential, but it is very much a first film cum glorified student project. It does a lot with limited resources and it's a good first effort.

[Nelson Swillie]

Katrina Parish though.

[Feralkid]

Pu 

I've never been able to face watching Ghosts of Mars, but any Carpenter film up to and including The Thing is 100% solid gold to me. AOP13 is more of a rip-off of John Ford, if anything, albeit a brilliant one.

Edit - Dark Star is fun, and quite influential, but it is very much a first film cum glorified student project. It does a lot with limited resources and it's a good first effort.

Please.  Assault on Precinct 13 is an urban take on Rio Bravo.  It's why Carpenter gives his editing credit to "John T. Chance" - the name of Wayne's character in Bravo.  It's a a Howard Hawks tribute through and through.

And Nelson, the remakes of Hills Have Eyes and Chainsaw were a good deal more nihilistic than the originals.   The original Chain-saw is remarkably restrained in the gore department and dispatches its doomed youngsters with relative speed.   The remake wallows in grungy misery, has gore in dreary abundance and even throws in a spectacularly nihlisitic scene where our heroine must euthanise her boyfriend because he's injured.   The remake of Hills turns its villains into grotesque mutants and has a far, far nastier rape scene.   

[Saucer51]

I saw Ten To Midnight when I was about 14. Not a nice film and seeing it a few years later I recognised is as little more than porno for people who like seeing women stalked, terrified then cut to pieces. I do think that modern films such as Hostel and Saw are no better. In fact they are vile. I'm always amazed that the wholesale and graphic slaying of human beings can be deemed as entertainment.

[Zero Gravitas]

I'm pretty sure that's linetrap.

[Nelson Swillie]

I saw Ten To Midnight when I was about 14. Not a nice film and seeing it a few years later I recognised is as little more than porno for people who like seeing women stalked, terrified then cut to pieces. I do think that modern films such as Hostel and Saw are no better. In fact they are vile. I'm always amazed that the wholesale and graphic slaying of human beings can be deemed as entertainment.

I quite agree. Fucking disgusting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1-NpyaOWV0