Violent Midnight (1963)

If you can get past the spotty acting and the less than stellar production values, you'll discover an interesting early slasher., 17 April 2006

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.

6/10