FrightFest 2016 Film Review - Night of Something Strange (2016)

Clearly, any movie that strives to corral marital rape, necrophilia, and vaginal cannibalism into a pre-credits paddock is not saving up for a rental deposit in Cinderella castle. Even so, this indie horror represents a remarkable new low point in a genre not exactly renowned for its high brows.

Just like a cute little Jack Russell that cuddles up to you on the sofa, so it can piss on your carpet when you fall asleep, this impish B-movie only creates boundaries in order to cross them.

Watching Night of Something Strange is a batteringly addictive experience. A kind of endurance test of genre bingo with a card generated in the dank soulless rape cellar of a socially broken collective.

Critiquing it is even tougher because the harder you beat this determinedly puerile pinata of depravity, the more dissolutely nefarious gifts it showers down. Until eventually, you become overwhelmed by the mucus, micturition, and male gametes, and are swept along by an endless tide of bodily fluids into an open ocean of excreta.

Many will level the misogyny shotgun at Night of Something Strange, a wholly pointless exercise, as it will just grab the barrel with both its grubby little hands, stick it where the sun doesn’t shine and reach for the trigger. The ugly truth is it derides everybody and anybody, including itself, just as equally and will make it YOUR fault for taking the whole thing so seriously.

Night of Something Strange constantly veers manically between infantile and very nasty indeed, but there is an undeniable force of nature peppering the proceedings that never lets it slide into the desperate mire of indifference.

The narrative possesses all the moral finesse of a crack-addled gibbon dry heaving into a radioactive pit latrine, and the character arcs are about as circumspect as Leatherface at a lumberjack convention. But do not be fooled – this vociferous Midnight movie is absolutely nowhere near as badly made as it wants you to think it is.

Night of Something strange is the cinematic equivalent of the unlaid obnoxious kid guffawing at the back of biology class when the teacher slips a condom over a banana.

In terms of a moral compass, it is an infected heroin needle floating in a petri dish of diarrhea.

It is both the perfect backdrop to the sound of ring pulls hissing in the dark, as laughing friends pass around pizza slices, and the true reasoning behind Luis Buñuel carrying rocks in his pockets.

It is also one of the most utterly unrepentant, irreverent, and terrifically entertaining horror films of the year.