After Midnight – review

Directors: Various

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

Like its predecessor, Around Midnight, this was a shot on and straight to video effort and so, like that, it carries the caveat that If you are able to track down this anthology film it is going to look just that – with the fuzz one expects from such a film.

This is half an hour longer, however, and feels more ambitious (though it still isn’t great). They get rid of the host and have the wraparound as a woman (Nancy Feliciano) reading a book called After Midnight (thus the segments are the stories therein) – she does become a vampire. All the segments, bar one, are vampire, also. The one that isn’t is about a woman (Heidi Honeycutt) on her own when a virus has killed off the rest of the world it seems.

Sky and Art

The first segment is I Want to be a Vampire in which reporter Art (Johnny Monotone) pitches up at a woman’s house, she’s called Sky (Laura Giglio, Deep Undead), as there have been vampire related deaths reported and he wants to interview her with regards this due to her claims of being undead. He is sceptical, however, despite her insistence she is a vampire and her suggestion that she is 166 years old. He asks for the lights to be put on (vampires are scared of the sun, not lightbulbs) and she takes him to meet her feeder (Cruz Machine) who is strapped up in the closet. Eventually her façade breaks and it is revealed she is a wannabe – but perhaps Art is more than he seems…

bite

In the most complex of the stories (and the segment that struggles the most narratively because of this), entitled A Moment of Darkness, we see a woman in a disco. She is Dr. Janeane Melocarro (Cindy Osbourne). She meets a guy but this is superfluous to the main story. At home she gets a page and goes to the hospital in which there is a violent patient (Tiffany Warren) who manages to bite her and, of course, she turns. Where things become confused is with the vampire visiting her and, it appears, that they knew each other though no indication to that effect was given in the hospital scene.

photographing the dead

The last vampire segment is called the Perfect Subject and it involves a girl (Isabelle Stephen, Vampire Sisters) who has paid a photographer (Rick Trembles) to come and take some modelling shots – first clothed and then nude. He buggers off, much to her disappointment, so she gets dressed whilst another photographer (Michael Will) enters and strangles her because when she is dead she becomes his Perfect Subject. He is somewhat shocked, therefore, when she opens her eyes… guess what she is…

fangs

And that’s it, much more vampire facing but still a low-to-no budget effort, straight to video with a horrible print. There is a market for such films, of course, and this probably deserves the same 2.5 out of 10 that the other got, marred by simple narratives (and narrative confusion in the more complex story).

The imdb page is here.