Initially promising vampire movie opens with a montage sequence of television news programs detailing the death of civilization as we know it--a disease that starts in the Middle East and spreads throughout the world, wiping out huge swaths of population in every country as a result. By the end of the newscasts we find that the disease has finally devastated the USA and that the disease story was actually a cover--the real culprit for all the death and devastation was vampires. The intriguing opening suggests that this might be for vampire movies what 28 Days was for zombie movies--an attempt to inject some fresh life into a very tired horror genre--but then the movie proper actually starts and it takes about forty five seconds for all of that initial promise to disappear. Bad production values and laughably awful acting sink Midnight Mass completely. The script has some good ideas, but it hardly matters when the rest of the movie is so poorly made. Fans of evangelical Christian movies might enjoy this, though, since the material is quite a bit more aggressively Christian than most vampire movies--in large part the script seems designed to show a plucky young female atheist the error of her ways and make her pay in the end for her unforgivable lack of faith. While I said previously that the script had some good ideas, this wasn't one of them. If bad acting and Christian sermonizing are your thing, by all means see Midnight Mass. If you want to see a scary horror movie, take a pass.
