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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

31 Days of Halloween Day: 17

The Midnight Hour
1985
Jack Bender

A group of high school kids (including LeVar Burton and Shari Belafonte) “borrow” some things from a witchcraft museum to use for Halloween costumes and accidentally unleash a cemetery full of zombies, werewolves and vampires onto their town.
 
This was a made-for-TV movie, so don't go in expecting a lot of gore or violence (although there is a little blood and the vampires and werewolves don’t mess around when they attack someone.) It is however stepped in a fun Halloween atmosphere cut with just the right amount of 80’s cheese.  The monster make-up is fun, with the zombies obviously taking some notes from ‘Thriller’. The limits of television resulted in some interesting choices, a vampire attack that uses bursting wine bottles in lieu of gallons of blood for instance.  The tone of the whole thing starts out pretty light, but things get darker and darker as Phil (Lee Montgomery) and his girlfriend from beyond the grave, Sandy (Jonna Lee) race to stop the curse as each of their friends end up falling to the monsters.  There is also an out of nowhere musical number in the middle of the movie, but it was the 80’s and that kind of thing happened once and a while.

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