arcticcarrot
I posted a review of this film in my blog, "Good Things About Bad Movies." But I feel a need to place it here on IMDb as well. So here you go: Holy moly, Midnight Mass is a terrible movie. But it's in the category of So-Bad-That-It's-Good. First off, it's Christian propaganda wrapped in the guise of a horror film. And like most Christian propaganda, there's nothing subtle about it. It's about as subtle as Mel Gibson (remember him?). I expected characters to turn and look into the camera and say, "It's up to you to turn this world back to a God-fearing Christian world." They do almost as much.That aside, this film has probably the worst group of actors ever assembled - and i'm including all groups of actors, even third-graders performing a grammar school holiday play. Clearly, it was some Christian group who got a hold of film equipment and money, but decided to do the acting themselves.The two heroes of the film are Gwen, who is referred to as "the town atheist," and her friend Joe, a fallen priest. Will they both find their way back to the church by the film's end? Of course.The story combines the vampire legends with the zombie scenario. Basically, the world is overrun with vampires, and there are very few people left. Society has completely broken down.So how did Gwen, who is on the heavy side, survive this long? Seriously. She seems to have trouble walking. It's both hilarious and painful to watch her move on the screen. Her body seems to be going in several directions at once, and to add to that, she likes to flail her arms around while "acting." And the director (who perhaps subconsciously hated this poor woman) has her running in a couple of scenes, and walking on sand in another scene. And he has her riding a bicycle. Basically he does everything he can to make her look even worse.Every time she's on screen, all i could think was, "How is this one of the few people who have survived?" She never sleeps. She carries no provisions. She has no survival plan. She has no place to hide during the night. In fact, she just wanders around at night when the vampires are out. She has no weapons (except of course for a large cross that she wears, even though she's an atheist - a cross which sometimes disappears for a few scenes, then reappears). And she can't run, or even walk well. She has no skills whatsoever. How has she survived? The only clue we get to her survival is at the beginning of the film, when a group of humans who serve the vampires capture her (easily). They're about to put her in their car, when they see a more attractive blonde and decide to get her instead, figuring they can always come back and get the fat girl later. So basically the vampires aren't interested in her. Poor girl, you get the idea that no one has ever been interested in her.When the characters aren't preaching to the audience (and even sometimes when they are), there are some hilarious lines in this film. Like this line from Gwen: "I'm okay. As okay as I can be sitting in a Catholic church eating stew." And there is a girl, Mickey, who laments that she used to think vampires were cool and that Anne Rice was cool and on and on, but now sees how wrong she was. And then she blurts out, "I never wanted to see a dead baby." Not that we've seen any dead babies on screen or anything, or that any have been mentioned up to now.And it seems that Mickey, before she returned to the church, was involved in a lesbian relationship with one of the vampires' servants. The only thing more frightening to Christians than vampires is of course gay people. But Mickey is over that bit of nastiness and has repented.This movie also has - and this blew me away - a musical montage scene where the priest and the atheist and a few other people clean up the church to restore it to a proper Christian place. They remove corpses and rebuild crosses and on and on - it's like those wonderful 1980s montages where in the span of one song, a group of characters completes some impossible task. I never expected a scene like that in this film.And of course because uptight Christians are really doing their best to hide their repressed desires, there are wonderful twisted sex scenes with flagellation and cutting and fur restraints (which i totally want, by the way). Of course, it's the "bad guys" who engage in such behavior - but it's clear that the filmmakers really enjoyed these scenes. They seemed to take more care on these than on any other scenes. Ah, if only these silly bastards could admit their true desires, the world would be a better place.This insane pile of propaganda was directed Tony Mandile, who also co-wrote the script and even appears as an actor in the film. Ouch. This is the only film Tony directed, amen. And this is the only film that Pamela Karp (who plays Gwen) ever appeared in. Amen again.
originalvampire
I'm a fan of F. Paul Wilson. I'm a die-hard Repairman Jack fan and I certainly hope that when he decides to put Jack in an actual film, he won't allow the dick(s) that massacred this story to do it. The novel Midnight Mass was truly an ass-kicker. So many of the critical characters were left out of this film. It is not hard to write a script from a novel and maintain all or at least most of the characters. The only positive thing I can say about this film is the lead in sequence of news footage. That was the best way to describe the vampire takeover of the world. The rest of it, needs to go back to the drawing board. This was obviously a rushed project without any serious thought being given to the book. F. Paul Wilson should be ashamed and the writers of this script should have a foot put up their asses and given a twist!
doc34
I rent this movie in DVD fullscreen format, I don't remember a vampire movie so bad it looks like a super-8 movie it has it all bad acting,bad lines bad filming Please save your money and dont rent it.
Poe-17
Frustrating because this was a semi neat notion whose execution just ... came undone. The gang should get an A for attempt but I'm afraid every thing else misses. Badly. It stole from virtually every horror notion that came before it, a forgivable sin if it could run with the stolen merchandise but it, instead, limps and stumbles. This was an F. Paul Wilson project, which, despite Wilson's popularity, explains alot. Our leading lady takes a lot of flack in reviews, and she earned them, but her problem isn't that she can't act. She does nicely with the dramatic moments but can't carry the in betweens. The in betweens was the movie trying to address the philosophical and spiritual concepts and conflicts of religion vs. an apocalyptic vampire plague. Heavy stuff that could have been fun to investigate, or it could have been addressed as this film did and be merely uninteresting and unresolved. When the story tried to come together, the acting fell apart and when the acting tried to kick in gear, the story dissolved. The movie built a golden opportunity, never before done as far as I know, hinted and foreshadowed at it for half the movie but chose to ignore it when the time came to deliver. *****************MAJOR SPOILER ALERT********************* Our defrocked priest is several times challenged with "Do you think you could resist the hunger if you became a vampire?", to which he promises he could. This is repeated enough times you just know it has to be a plot element and maybe the film's one redeeming feature but when the time comes, our priest never has to test his metal. It never happens! Wow, what a way to condense all he film's philosophical and religious pontification into end scenes with the vampire priest slamming his faith against his undead hunger. What a loss. That scene needs to happen in a film. It's a whale of a horror idea. But, nope, too much weight for this film's mastermind to carry. ****************END OF SPOILER****************************** There are neat nuances like much ugly vampires whimpering and whining for their food in a very original way and fight scenes with only noise and music but no fighting. Off screen scenes that needed to be on screen and on screen things that would be tons more effective off screen. High promise and no delivery. This kind of film is frustrating because of what it could have been. It needs to be remade by competent hands. But it won't. Too bad.
