Night Vision

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.

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.

My review was written in July 1988 after watching the feature on Prism video cassette.

The made-for-video feature film has its merits as a modest rites-of-passage tale of a young man trying to make it in the big city, but its attempted horror concept is purely shaggy dog.

Stacy Carson gives an engaging performance as Andy, a budding writer from Kansas who heads to the big metropolis (actually Denver) to make his fame and fortune. Pic details his frequent butting up against reality, as people mistreat him and he finds it hard to make ends meet.

He eventually gets a job in a video store and develops a crush on a girl (Shirley Ross) who works there, but the horror plot device intrudes in the form of a stolen VCR containing a tape made by a satanic cult. The tape apparently causes Andy to become a killer at night and to write stories during his sleep; also, events are mystically taped sans camera. Special effects and violent scenes are handled in chintzy fashion.

Besides Carfson, there is an effective, against-the-cliche performance by diminutive Tony Carpenter as an Italianate street hood who drags Andy into his criminal activities.

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.