Midnight Movie

Briefly playing in a late night engagement before moving to the eternal netherworld of DVD comes Midnight Movie. MM hit me with a double assault of celluloid. It was confusing me and boring me at the same time. At the beginning a mental patient is allowed to see a horror film he once directed against the concerns of one of the doctors. Naturally events go ballistic as the entire sanitarium is massacred.
Years later The Dark Beneath is booked into a movie theater. The main characters consist of two pairs of youngsters who look and overact cute. Aside from them the theater audience consists of a horror film geek, a biker and his chick, a detective who's been warned to stay away from the movie, along with the doctor from the beginning, and stir in a couple of nerdy employees also teens. As Dark Beneath, which itself is a black-and-white evocation of low budget 60s/70s horror films, unwinds various members of the aud start to die when the wander off to the bathroom or go to another part of the theater. Then we see the killer dragging them down the hall in the movie within the movie. Get it, the director was not a victim but the sanitarium killer and now his soul inhabits the film and turns the theater into his own personal version of hell.
Wes Craven could do this sort of twist with verve in a film like Shocker (where the killer was in the electricity after his was executed). Midnight Movie inhabits a circle of hades below B-grade genre crunchers. The film within a film brought to mind The Dark Backward a 1991 Adam Rifkin movie although the glint of humor never glistens in Midnight Movie. While the lighting never contributes any terror the sound design is nothing but loud grinding noises (the killer sharpening his unique twisted metal killing device) that annoy more than scare. None of the actors stand out although a few, like the biker, are stereotypically cast.
Even with its modest budget a film like Midnight Movie enjoys a certain half life on disc due to the popularity of the horror genre. The filmmakers have obviously watched a lot of these types of movies, but Midnight Movie doesn't deserve cult status.