I bought this around the same time that I bought The Wickeds, and since it was the same type of straight-to-video release and had similarly pointless and cheap cover art I had expected to see a sub-par low-budget horror flick. And that is exactly what I got, but not in the way that I expected. This is not simply a bad vampire film. This is a bad Christian propaganda film disguised as a bad vampire film.
The film starts nicely generic, in a away you know from many a cheap zombie-apocalypse film: a montage of news reports about a strange virus, etc. Fast forward a year, and society as we know it has broken down – or so we are told. Vampires roam the earth unchecked – at night anyway.
Our plucky heroine Gwen decides it is time to take action against the local vampire nest. Why she takes that decision now stays as nebulous as her long-term strategy. All we know is that she tries to get the parish’s former priest, a young and handsome alcoholic, to join her in her fight.
Midnight Mass is based on a novella by well-known SciFi author F. Paul Wilson. The screenplay has been written by the film’s director/producer, Tony Mandile, who reportedly deviated from the source material. But Mandile has more than just those three roles to fill in the crew-list. And looking at the film, one suspects it owes its existence to the fact that Mandile wanted a showcase to demonstrate his talents as make-up and effects guy. It is this field in which the film manages to shine a bit, and it is the field in which Mandile has made his career ever since.
There are a number of things that are wrong with this film, but they are for the most part “a bit off” rather than a complete failure. But it is their combined influence that brings this film down.
On the technical side, the main problem is the poor audio quality of the dialogue. I am not sure where the problem lies exactly, possibly the “audio mixing” process? There are also scene in which you get the impression that the dialogue has been ADRed. It could simply be the case that the post-production work on the audio was so poor that it merely sounds like ADR; or it could be that the recorded audio was so poor that they had to ADR the worst scenes. On the other hand, the problem might rest solely with the DVD-transfer.
The editing is also not good. No big problems as such, but the editing leaves the viewer hanging: going from one scene to the next, there is absolutely no sense of time and (especially) place. You have no idea what distance people have travelled, or how much time has passed. The characters will tell you on occasion, but even then you do not feel it.
I mention this editing issue specifically because it fits into a wider problem with world-building in this film. There is a lot of exposition – too much of it in fact – and it does try to tell us what this new world is like. But the scenes we are shown do not fit that description. Apparently, vampires have overrun the earth, and the numbers of the human population have dwindled so much that the vampires cannot find enough food. But we can see a number of scenes with lots of humans in them. Apparently, society has broken down, but we can see people organising food, getting tattoos, etc., etc. Apparently, people have barricade themselves in their homes at night, so that vampires cannot get in. But we almost exclusively see humans “shelter” in places that have more open doors and windows than an advent calendar at Christmas. Apparently, humans cannot go out at all after nightfall, as vampires roam the streets. And yet we see humans who repeatedly, and without necessity, walk all over the place at night.
Tony Mandile picked some excellent outside locations for his film. It was shot in New Jersey and is full of abandoned and dilapidated buildings that are highly cinematic. I believe “ruin porn” is the phrase commonly used for this. Aesthetically, it may not be on the same level as Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, but it uses a similar backdrop. And yet Mandile fails to follow through by showing us everyday life and human behaviour that would fit that backdrop. If the buildings are meant to be an indicator for this new world, the humans in these scenes do not fit. Just like the humans do not fit the world-building of the exposition.
The vampires do not fit this new world either. We are told they are the dominating species now. But they are neither clever nor powerful enough. We are told they got organised, but we only see a rabble of ghouls.
This last problem stems from the fact that this film is a bit of a hotchpotch of ideas. A vampire story, but in the vein of a zombie-apocalypse. A zombie-apocalypse that somehow introduces the sustainability angle from Daybreakers half-way through. A Christian propaganda film that has faint echoes of Satanic Panic films and for some reasons includes not only a “black mass” type of scene but also random shots of S&M sex.
Still, at the beginning, I was willing to go with the film. Yes, the zombie-apocalypse news montage was generic; and yes, the first act wasted way too much time showing our heroine riding a bicycle; and yes, she was spouting way too much exposition (including information she should not have had). But at least it felt like the film was trying to do its own thing.
But the first act was dragging on far too long and slowly, and the discussion between Gwen in her call-to-arms mode and the very reluctant Father Joe is rather tedious. Pamela Karp, the actress playing Gwen, is not a bad actress; she is almost able to carry the film as a lead character, but she cannot pull off the many monologues in this film. She is hampered by the poor dialogue and probably a lack of firm directing. On top of that, it seems to me that this film has issues in scenes like this with its timing and editing; and the score is not all that fitting either in these scenes. So everything is working against Karp a bit, and I am not sure that this is by accident. You see, it turns out that Gwen is not actually the lead character, but merely acts as a catalyst. Therefore Karp must not convince as a lead, as Gwen is not meant to be a leader of men – Father Joe is. And sure enough, very soon this film goes through a weird transformation in which Joe becomes the lead character and Gwen is merely hanging around. By that time, we are roughly 55 minutes into this 100-minute film.
It is at this point that Mandile seriously decides to make the renovation of a church the central aspect of his film. Not as a useful base to organise the fight against vampires – they even remove the boards from the boarded up windows to make the building less safe – but as a merely symbolic gesture.
It is also at this point that Carl, an elderly Irish-American, enters the film telling everyone how in the good old days everyone had respect for the Catholic Church and how this vampire plague is God’s way of cleansing the earth of non-believers. Now, you may think that Carl is just the crazy guy that every horror film needs, but you would be wrong. In Mandile’s world, Carl is the voice of reason.
Consequently, at this point, the story falls apart completely. The first act introduced Gwen, an atheist, and Father Joe, a priest abandoned by his bishop, and we learn how much they always respected each other’s opinion. Their interaction and co-operation should have been the central plank of this film and would have made for an intriguing character constellation with ample possibilities for good dialogue and for scenes that would have been rewarding for the actors.
Instead, Father Joe becomes the lead character, with Carl as a cheerleader, and the young girls (Gwen and Carl’s daughter Micky) are shown as the lost sheep that have to return to the flock.
And here we are already getting into the territory of the film’s questionable politics. Mind you, I doubt that any of this was really Mandile’s intention. It is more likely that this happened because he did not pay attention to what small story-telling decisions can amount to in the end. But what we are left with is a universe in which men are leaders, women are not (even if they think they are). Men are right, women are confused. Believers are right, everyone else is condemned. Goth subculture equals devil worship, and a teenage girl’s interest in Anne Rice novels is the slippery slope that leads to hell. Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, and either a sign of naivety and confusion or of hedonistic depravity. And so on, and so forth …
As I said, some things seem unfortunate rather than deliberate. They can, for example, also be the combination of seemingly unconnected elements. Father Joe had been removed from his post because there were rumours about paedophilia. We are told that he was innocent, but it makes Carl’s enthusiasm and his statement that in the good old days people had proper respect for the Catholic Church sound especially off, as in combination it might indirectly sound like he is saying that in the good old days people would have kept their mouths shut and not have dared raising this issue.
The aforementioned anti-homosexuality issue is a similar unfortunate aspect that probably simply happened by accident because someone decided that there should be more interconnections between various characters. Similarly, there is an anti-government stance throughout this film. The government “lied”, we are told. They knew about the vampires but kept talking about a virus. Why they should have done this is never explained, but the claim stands. In the news montage at the film’s beginning, it is the scientists, especially the CDC, who reject a supernatural explanation. Combine this with Carl’s fundamentalist Catholic statements, and the story basically puts the blame for this vampiric apocalypse on the fact that scientists and the government do not blindly believe in God. So this is an anti-science as well as an anti-government angle. Again, I am not sure that the scope and force of this sentiment was entirely deliberate, but it is there and it feels especially repulsive today in the age of climate change denial and COVID conspiracy nonsense.
The acting is adequate, but the script has nothing to back up the performances. There are a number of humans who collaborate with the vampires. They are meant to be interesting (or at least intriguing), but they are complete non-entities, not primarily because of the acting, but because of the script. I talked about Pamela Karp’s problems with the screenplay earlier, and at the point at which Gwen is sidelined our non-heroine falls completely apart in a way that is not properly set up (and that could not make any sense even if it were).
The only really weak performance is that by David Dwyer as Carl. You do not for one moment feel that Dwyer believes in his character, and so his lines come out in a semi-exaggerated tone that you would normally only find in children’s films.
The strongest performances are those by Douglas Gibson as Father Joe, Mariana Matthews as Carl’s daughter Micky, and Marvin W. Schwartz as a vampiric priest. Schwartz hams it up in a fantastic fashion, very fitting for a vampire B-movie, but lost here as he acts in a vacuum. If other characters had been allowed to display even half the energy that Schwartz pumps into his character, the film would be less anaemic and at least somewhat entertaining. Matthews is not given much help by the script, but at least her character has a solid emotional backstory that she can work with, which – combined with her obvious talent – leads to a really decent performance in this somewhat small role.
Douglas Gibson is not given any good material either, and there are passages of dialogue that make this painfully obvious. But since the screenplay chose him as the replacement lead, he is at least given room and screen-time to fill, and he does that rather well.
As I said, Midnight Mass is, storywise, pretty much a disaster. Apart from the overall solid cast, and the few nicely chosen “ruin porn” locations, the film’s only other solid aspect lies in the practical effects, especially the creature make-up. Director Tony Mandile worked on both the make-up and the effects. I believe that the effects are almost exclusively practical and that there is one example of animatronics in there. As I pointed out earlier, Mandile’s work since 2003 seems to have been focused on make-up and effects, and his love for these fields can be seen in this film. Not all of this may be state-of-the-art, but is shows the dedication and the love for detail. But also the love for variety: several vampires are shown in a feral, zombiesque state, and Mandile uses this to showcase a number of different takes on this. The only negative consequence is that he may be too much in love with his own art, and there is one particular scene (containing the effects/make-up/animatronics highlight of the film) which goes on for far too long. Clearly the mandate for Tom Agnello in the combined cinematographer/editor role was not to lose a single second of that footage.
This film had a lot of ingredients that could have turned this into an average B-movie, but the story falls apart, and the film has little else going for it. The fact that this film is entirely tone-deaf on so many levels and morphs into a Christian propaganda film (whether by design or not), makes it entirely unwatchable for the casual viewer. But the film’s worst property is that it is surprisingly boring throughout, which for a horror film is pretty unforgivable.
I got this film for a few pennies on ebay, but the price sticker tells me that apparently some poor sod once paid 13 Euros for this shambolic mess. Which is an thought that really pains me.
Rating: 2 out of 10, purely as a recognition for the effort that went into this.
Vampire Film Reviews 