Night Vision

Listen not to the noisy negativists: This is actually a pretty unique, offbeat little relic of the home video era, a shot on video feature made in Denver, Colorado featuring a cast of more or less unknowns, not much of a budget, a handful of clichés and one heck of an interesting idea. It is perhaps a bit too subtle and low-key for it's own good: With some bared flesh & an upped gore ante, this actually could have become a classic of the 80s direct to home video horror idiom. There is a David Lynch-esquire melding of reality, fantasy and either the supernatural or psychosis, depending upon how you deconstruct the ending, and a kind of irrepressible ultra low budget weirdness that reminds me of Jess Franco's more subtle efforts. Though without all the zoom lens effects.

The plot is so simple as to make the film appear to be about something it isn't: Kansan hayseed nebbish comes to the big city to find his fame & fortune writing a great American horror novel, encounters rejection and failure at every corner until befriended by a smart-mouthed street hustler. Really small: About five foot two, if even (MIDNIGHT COWBOY, anyone?). Along the way he applies for a job at a video rental store and strikes up a relationship with the punkish cutie pie behind the very small counter. At some point he comes into the possession of a VCR (remember those?) which was stolen with a cassette still inside, which as it turns out used to belong to members of a Midwestern satanic cult notorious for sacrificing cats. Meanwhile a hard boiled but remarkably clean-cut detective starts to try and piece together a series of crimes that are exactly like those described in the book being written by the new guy in town -- Are you getting all this down? because it may be on the quiz later.

In case you have not guessed this is a movie with ideas that exceed the 17" screen of my TV set, which is probably why there are some less than favorable comments about it. If you allow yourself to dwell on the deliberately paced plotting and K-Mart budget production values you might easily be fooled into thinking this a waste of time. But right from the start of the film attuned viewers will instinctively key in on some truly bizarre oddities. Some are obvious, like the running joke about kids stealing video boxes from the store that are empty & marked FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY. Then there is the offbeat product placement by Labatt's beer (lager, if I recall correctly) and Black and White label canned baked beans.

The "hero" of the film is also a puzzler, played with doe-eyed recalcitrance by an actor named Stacy Carson who never did anything else. He looks like David Byrne from the Talking Heads with these creepy, luminous eyes that suggested to me the guy was completely insane from the second he appeared on screen. One of the running plot devices has him repeatedly speaking on the phone with his mother back in Kansas, but since we never even hear her voice and his grip on reality starts to become more tenuous as the film progresses my conclusion was that she never even existed. The guy looks like a creepy, neurotic Midwestern weirdo, like that freak who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey. He has absolutely no charisma or definable character traits, existing as a sort of cypher upon which the rest of the cast projects their emotions. One of the strangest scenes is when he first starts to encounter odd manifestations of the supernatural due to the influence of this demonic VCR and goes to visit his street hustler buddy, who reluctantly lets him into his dingy flat wearing just his underwear & a black muscle shirt. Watching some flaky, woe-begotten nerd describing his troubles to a 5'2" guy with a mustache who talks like Joe Pesci may not have been a deliberate decision by the filmmaker to screw with the mind of his viewers, but it got a loud verbal "WHAT THE HELL??" out of me: You gotta see it to understand the strangeness of the juxtaposition.

Another thing I liked about the movie is how it started to blur the boundaries between what was happening in the "real" world of the film as well as the "imaginary" world of what was on the haunted VCR, which of course matched exactly what the guy had written in his "book" (manuscript is the more appropriate term, I believe), all of which culminates in a quite effective scene where someone finds themselves trapped in a room with somebody else who it turns out is either a demoniacally possessed satanic serial killer, or just some lunatic from Topeka. By not answering which the film turns out to be a puzzle without a solution: Was this all just the deranged fantasy of a madman? Or did some evil worshiping cult actually manage to project evil onto a previously owned rental tape of PAINT YOUR WAGON that they recorded their satanic ritual onto?

I say the former, though we'll probably never know for sure & that makes it even more fun. Here is a movie that not only defies formula but has no formula, only a bunch of clichés arranged in an offbeat, unconventional order that is ambiguous enough to offer multiple conclusions. Combine that with the absurd notion that Denver is some seething snake pit of evil that would make Travis Bickle's NYC from TAXI DRIVER seem tame by comparison and we are talking about a sleepy little cult sleeper that probably ever won't be re-discovered, but if you happen upon an old Prism Video VHS of it give yourself the benefit of a screening. While lacking in the gore or nudity department this is a movie with enough ideas to float it regardless.

6/10; Quite enjoyable, actually.

Stumbled upon this on On Demand, and was intrigued: NIGHT VISION is an '80s horror I'd never even heard of (which means it's REAL obscure) and it was shot and set in Colorado, where I've lived all my life. So, obviously, I watched it, and was slightly impressed and more-than-slightly dumbfounded.

It's about a shy, whiny writer from Kansas that moves to the seedy underbelly of Denver to get story ideas. He makes friends with a criminal-type named Vinny, who soon gifts him a VCR that once belonged to a scary cult. The VCR leaves Mr. Kansas able to write scary, violent short stories that end up coming true. Oh, and he works at a video store for some reason.

So, to clarify, many of you looking at '80s C-horror movies on IMDb may be looking for so-bad-it's-funny material, and NIGHT VISION really won't be your cup of tea. There's sporadic laughs, but it's actually very slow-moving, nothing much really happens, it completely shies away from gore and nudity, and it's not really even a horror movie. Perhaps the funniest thing about the film is its portrayal of Denver as the seediest, most crime-ridden city in the world, one that is seemingly physically impossible NOT to get robbed, stalked or killed while walking its streets. Even as a current resident that knows this is far from the truth, NIGHT VISION made me want to get the hell out of this black hole of a city.

But no, this is not Bad Movie Night material. Instead, it's a slow-burn oddity that aims more to be a Cronenberg or Lynch-style psychological thriller than a gory cheesefest. It never completely hits the mark, but it does manage to sustain a weird, slightly unsettling atmosphere (mostly due to its home-movie qualities) and is compulsively watchable. Almost nothing happened in its 100-minute running time, but I still found myself intrigued by NIGHT VISION from start to finish.

I'm not sure whether to call the main actor horrible or great; he's whiny and annoying the entire time, but you do get an air of sociopathy about him. One reviewer here compares him in looks to David Byrne, but I got more of an Ian Curtis vibe. He's really not good at all, but he adds to the odd atmosphere of the film. But the ending is really effective, muddling the plot-line even more than it previously was and leaving the film completely without answers. It worked surprisingly well.

I can't really recommend NIGHT VISION to most people and it's certainly not an unjustly forgotten classic, but viewers in the mood for something off the beaten path and zero-budget might find something to like here.

After moving to New York, a small-town writer receives a strange VCR as a gift only to find that the tape's contents of Satanic rituals and ceremonies allows him to see a series of gruesome murders committed around the city.

Overall this one isn't all that spectacular and didn't have much going for it. Among the many problems with this one is that there's just not enough screen-time here to really get invested in the horror angle behind this one as far too much time is taken up with lame and non- frightening scenarios that just don't give off any true horror feel from any of the scenes. The main part here is the inherent fish-out-of-water storyline about how he's just arrived in the big city and completely inexperienced in life to be able to handle this which leads to his struggles to find a place to live and support himself which leads into the drawn-out romance angle here that isn't in the slightest bit interesting being telegraphed from the very beginning by the first moment they meet which really spoils that storyline quite early. The second half of this, him meeting up with the shifty hustler is just plain drawn-out and lifeless which just makes this seem all the more lame by furthering a plot-line already featured throughout this one and quite weakly by making it out like all New York inhabitants are seedy individuals. Not only do these plot-points make this one quite troubling overall in terms of pacing and generating interest, the mere factor of keeping the horror off-screen is also quite a large hurdle to overcome here which also tends to run this down by turning the horror into quite lame scenes anyway. The process of watching him go crazy and turn into a beady-eyed paranoiac doesn't really ring true all that much since the majority of time the possessed VCR is running on static and indecipherable snowy pictures which tends to make his reaction to them all the more confusing and incoherent. While the last half does tend to make this quite enjoyable as the slowly-unraveling police investigation turns out to be far better than expected at piecing everything together while generating a few solid suspense scenes here with the playback of the Satanic rituals finally being shown in full and getting the film with a solid gore count, these here aren't enough to really hold this up against the flaws.

Rated R: Language, Violence and Brief Nudity.

A VCR is used by a satanic sect to record a ritual sacrifice. Said VCR gets stolen an sold to our protagonist. At night, it glows and all of a sudden, people get murdered in very low-budget ways or off-screen. Who can the killer be?

"Night Vision" is a no-budget horror flick with nothing much to commend it. Poor acting, virtually non-existent script, and also makes the mistake of taking itself seriously. No even fun for bad movie fans, as there just isn't anything happening.

I was one of the unpaid extras in this film. It was a great night in Denver I must say. Being a student of photography at CU Denver, I was downtown capturing the night skyline for a class with friends. As we were walking we saw a small crowd of people and decided to crash the event. One of my friends swore they saw Demi Moore in one of the outdoor scenes shot against one of the buildings. We hung out a while and then we were asked to be extras in one of the scenes. I had no idea what this movie was about nor did we really care at that moment. I have never seen the movie itself and wouldn't even know where to begin the search for a copy but I am real interested in how it turned out. I recall our scene walking passed the car where the action was happening. Honestly, I'm just not sure we even made the "cut". It was later we were told the plot of the movie. Had I known the plot before hand, I'm not sure I would have signed the waiver. Just the same, Campy is fun! Sorry to hear the director passed.