Not only does the Avenue showing of "The Dark Beneath" attract the attention of bad movie goers, teens without lives, and a biker couple looking to put the spark back into their relationship with some back-of-the-theater oral, but it also catches the interest of police detective Doug Barrens. Barrens had some kind of personal vendetta to hunt down Radford and make him pay for the 70 otherwise innocent lives he smeared all over the walls of that sanitarium. Along with Dr. Cashin, the only New Haven staff member to avoid the carnage, Barrens attends the showing under the hunch that the Rad Man won't be able to resist the chance to take in a viewing of his beloved creation... which in and of itself is just a generic black & white bite off of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre apple. Its antagonist is a big limping redneck that wears a skull mask, lives in his crazy old mother's basement, and whose favorite pastimes are sharpening his giant corkscrew gardening tool thingy and killing wayward hippies with his giant corkscrew gardening tool thingy. It's actually important to know this, because eventually Skullface is going to be applying the latter to our cast... when he steps out of the movie to kill them.

From here on out, Midnight Movie's just another slasher flick for the most part. The exits of the theater all become impenetrable, nobody's cell phone works, and despite acknowledging that they're pretty much trapped in their own real life horror flick once the killings start, our cast still manages to come up with the stupidest excuse possible to split up and make themselves easier targets. You almost get the inkling that the writer had some kind of parody in mind for this armpit stain of a movie, but even then it's something that every ass-hat who watches these movies thinks is his/her own brilliant idea even after it's been done a few hundred times before them. Unlike your standard slasher flick though, Midnight Movie is harshly lacking in gratuitous hootery, and the gore is sadly toned down for a movie that could only have benefited from exploiting the red stuff. Sure, throw some nekkid titties and a pile of pig guts at your audience and you're still sticking them with a groin cramper on the scale of bad movie maladies, but at least it would be a groin cramper with some nekkid titties and a pile of pig guts to look at! If you can't entertain, you should at least go for some cheap titillation and revulsion so somebody has a good time. Even if you think you're above those things, trust me, you're not.

The movie gets remotely interesting a little over an hour into it, but by then it's almost over with anyway so we end up with yet another "too little, too late" waste of 80 minutes. The dialog is so generic that it's not even bad, it's just lazy. It's so lazy that I'm pretty sure it counts as sloth, and if thewhole Christianity thing turns out to be true and that 7 Deadly Sins shit is legit, writers Garbett and Messitt are in for a well deserved afterlife of torment. They try to be tongue in cheek by giving us characters that point out the obvious parallels between their situation and the slasher genre's numerous cliches, while at the same time throwing one scene at us that centers entirely around a guy farting. It's an uneven balance of *wink*wink* and toilet humor that feels like they didn't know which direction to go with so they just slapped in a little of both in a weak, disjointed attempt at appealing to a broader audience... and failing all over themselves instead... and down a set of stairs... and breaking their necks in the process.

Sadly, there is a spark of creativity in there somewhere that drowns in the compost surrounding it. You get the idea that writers Garbett and Messitt saw Bloody New Year or Shocker or The Last Action Hero and wrote what they thought was a can't miss script based on the same base "killer comes out of the movie" concept. After repeated rejections from every legitimate and not-so-legitimate studio, it's easy to picture the two being invested enough in their personal dream project that they mortgaged their houses or something just to see their little brain fart brought to life. Much like Vic Frankenstein's creation though, it came out twisted, grotesque, and hated by all who lay eyes upon it. I'm half tempted to pick up my favorite torch and pitchfork and start chasing that damn thing toward the old abandoned windmill! Sometimes making your own micro-budget creation actually works. Sadly, most times it doesn't. This is one of those many, many, many, many, MANY times when it doesn't. The best analogy I can come up with to explain this movie to fellow cinemasochists would be that it feels like one of Charles Band's terrible current run Full Moon movies, or maybe even a borderline Sci-Fi Channel Original, but without the washed up actors and lacking even the modicum of what either of the two would pass off as a production budget. Without a stable of other crap features to surround itself with like the movies produced by the "Big Two" of cinematic turds, Midnight Movie is also destined to be little more than a footnote in the history of disposable crap film. Hell, it doesn't even deserve a whole footnote! It's more like a toe-note... or a toenail-note... or a bunion-note... Either way, I'd rather have a film projector dropped on my foot than sit through this digitized hemorrhoid a second time. Being a diabetic, that's saying a lot too.

And so the "52 Weeks" project comes to a wheezing halt. No spectacular finale. No blaze of glory. No fireworks. No cheering crowds. Just another paint-by-numbers, point-and-shoot, generic pile of bland shit I made the mistake of stepping in. Sadly enough, it feels almost appropriate... Now, if you'd be so kind, "Get off my lawn!"