Dead Night Review: Barbara Crampton embraces her inner dark side in this slightly confused story.
Dead Night review by Kat Hughes.
Dead Night Review
It honestly wouldn’t be Frightfest without a Barbara Crampton film on the programme. Over the last few years she has been a constant familiar face, popping up in films all over the festival. Her previous films include You’re Next, Road Games, Beyond the Gates, and Replace. This year she forms part of documentary Cult of Terror, has a wicked guest spot in Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, and is downright wicked in Dead Night.
Dead Night opens in the year 1961 with a young couple making out in the woods. The pair, as so often in horror films, come foul to one of the oldest urban legends out there. Cut to a particularly violent birth sequence (one not fun to watch whilst pregnant). Then the story jumps forwards to the year 2015. Here we meet Casey (Brea Grant), her husband James (AJ Bowen), two teenage kids Jessica (Sophie Dalah) and Jason (Joshua Hoffman) and Jessica’s friend Becky (Elise Luthman); the group are going to a snowy cabin in the woods belonging to one of Casey’s friends. What no one realises however, is that their stay is all part of a meticulous and devilish plan.
Dead Night‘s narrative starts off in the traditional linear fashion, but soon breaks from the norm. Not long after arriving at the cabin the focus, and film suddenly shifts focus to a television documentary called ‘Inside Crime’. A TV show within the film, Inside Crime is a recreation of all those real-life crime documentaries that ITV and Channel 5 love to screen so much. The subject of the programme is none other than Casey herself, who is painted as a deranged murderer who butchered her whole family, earning her the name Axe Mom. The rest of the film flits between what the crime investigators on the show believe to be true, and what actually happened to Casey and her family. It’s an interesting technique, but one that fails to add much to the proceedings other than confusion. The constant switching back and forth between reality and documentary creates a muddled plot. Perhaps the technique would have been better utilised in just one chunk, either at the beginning before cutting to the real events, or at the end to warp what we’ve just seen.
Dead Night Review
What does make Dead Night such a compelling watch is Barbara Crampton. She started out her career in horror playing either the heroine or the victim, but recent times have seen her shift into more villainous roles. We’ve seen her play bad a few times now, but in Dead Night she’s off the charts evil, and is clearly relishing every moment of it. We first meet her character Leslie Bison during a commercial on Inside Crime. In it Leslie is making her case to be elected governor. The next time we see her on screen she’s mysteriously injured outside Casey’s cabin. Once taken in, she manages to quickly alienate all of her rescuers with her odd behaviour and inappropriate comments.
Events hereafter get rather confused, and at times it’s not one hundred percent clear what is happening. Suddenly there are bodies everywhere, some of them not staying properly dead, and there’s a lot of running around in the snowy woods. By the time you’ve gotten your head around things, Dead Night is almost over and hits the audience with another unexpected turn which just adds to the overall feeling of being totally perplexed.
Dead Night Review
Aside from the devilish Crampton, Dead Night strengths lie in its gore work. Though certainly stretched by a rather limited budget, the effects team have worked well. Granted, they are a little patchy in places (due to the restricted funding no doubt), but they attack the film with gusto and pull off a few great sequences. There’s the aforementioned violent labour, and towards the end there’s a transformation scene that appears to very much be in homage to An American Werewolf in London. Again, it doesn’t fully come off, but the effort should certainly be commended.
An instance of too many ideas and narrative styles, Dead Night fails to work how it should. A valiant turn from Crampton sadly cannot make up for this jumbled and confusing story.
Dead Night review by Kat Hughes, August 2018.
Dead Night screened as part of Arrow Video Frightfest 2018.
