The Midnight Game (2013) (DVD Review)
Directed By: A.D. Calvo
Starring: Renee Olstead, Shelby Young, Guy Wilson
Rated: R/Region: 1/2:35/Number of disc: 1
Available from Anchor Bay
Renee Olstead of The Secret Life of the American Teenager stars as a partying teen whose friends decide to perform an ancient pagan ritual found online called The Midnight Game: Candles are lit. A drop of blood is spilled. Your worst fear is confessed and an entity is summoned. But if the rules are not followed exactly, punishment is promised. Tonight, the game is not being taken seriously. A demonic horror has been unleashed. And now, even daylight cannot stop the nightmares that may destroy them all. Shelby Young (American Horror Story), Guy Wilson (Days Of Our Lives), Valentina de Angelis (Gossip Girl) and Spencer Daniels (Mom) co-star in this eerie chiller inspired by true events.
I can’t believe it took this long to get a movie inspired that the whole “Creepy Pasta” internet craze. Yet here it is and while I am starting to bore of found footage films, to do something like The Midnight Game right, I think it could have used the style. Anyway, what we get starts off pretty slow with your typical dumb kids summoning up things that shouldn’t plot that we’ve seen a lot in horror. After a while it gets kind of interesting in spots, but it drags its feet in other to void the good stuff out. I don’t know if I’d say the actors as a whole do a good job of selling the film, as the acting does indeed get too spotty. I also don’t think any jump scare or sudden loud noise does much in the way to do the movie any favors. It does bum me out to say this, because I REALLY wanted to see this and had high hopes for it.
Everyone who is familiar with the actual Midnight Game ritual knows how that works and the movie does follow that pretty well. It’s when questionable creatures and weird stuff taking place the day after the events start going out of left field and possibly jumping the shark that things take a turn for the worse. As I noted before, the film gets interesting enough in the middle that it for a brief time ALMOST saves the film before it all gets erased in the final 15 minutes of the movie. The film then concludes with a twist that if you didn’t get the first time the movie proceeds to try to slap you in the face with it until the very last shot. The movie gets very frustrating and it is even more so for me because it could have been a really fun film had it tried some new and not so typical things to mix in with the good idea.
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