The Midnight Man (2016)

While babysitting her senile grandma (Lin Shaye), teenager Alex (Gabrielle Haugh) and her boyfriend Miles (Grayson Gabriel) discover a dusty old box containing a game that supposedly summons a monster known as the Midnight Man, who matches wits against any players of his game over the course of three hours and thirty-three minutes, killing those who fail to best him. No sooner has granny screamed in terror at the sight of the kids opening the game than they've decided that they're gonna go ahead and play it, because fuck old people. Anyway, like the movie itself, this turns out to be a mistake, the aforementioned Midnight Man turns out to be real, and these dumbass kids with rockbottom survival instincts are in for a rough night.

So are you if "The Midnight Man" is your drug of choice this Halloween, since it's a dim, dumb slog of a movie that wastes a couple of big name actors in the shape of Lin Shaye and Robert Englund while providing only fleeting moments of gory relief from all its tedium and bad plotting. Like 2002's "Ghost Ship" it has a great, darkly funny opening, and like 2006's "When a Stranger Calls" it has a supporting character (Em Haine as Kelly) who gets involved in her friends' ordeal for seemingly no other reason than to be victimised by their supernatural foe. And like both of those movies, "The Midnight Man" pretty much sucks outside of those memorable scenes. Also, it's tough to root for characters as stupid and slow as the schmucks in this movie. The Midnight Man doesn't even have to be good to beat them. It would have been nice if the movie itself had been good though.