I suppose I should tell you why you should never pick The Night Brings Charlie.
The Night Brings Charlie is a 1990 slasher film that I’m pretty sure was direct-to-video. It tries to cover all the beats of your typical slasher fare but throws in a couple of changes which attempt to make things interesting. Ultimately it’s a movie about incompetence: the incompetence of the new local sheriff who cannot even say the name of the small town right, the incompetence of the mayor who is a terrible public official and an even worse actor, the incompetence of the local police force in fighting crime, the incompetence of the local teenagers (who apparently compromise 3/4 of the town’s population) in getting intoxicated and hitting on each other, and the incompetence of one naked lady to drink a Pepsi in the shower.
It’s also got incompetent directing, incompetent acting, an incompetent script, yadda yadda yadda. But I guess it tries, even though it’s painfully bad at times. So here’s the kicker: there’s a masked killer on the loose who likes to behead his victims, and the killings start at the same time that a local gardener who had a terrible accident involving a chainsaw and now wears a mask to hide his deformity returns to town. The local coroner is particularly disturbed by these murders and repeatedly warns his teenage daughter and new wife to be careful. Then someone begins leaving threatening phone calls to the local sheriff and the coroner.
So once the sheriff figures out that the big quiet masked dude who happens to be good with hedge trimmers is actually the big quiet masked dude who happens to be good at trimming heads, he brings in Charlie and tries to get him to talk. Charlie doesn’t talk, so the coroner, who happens to be Charlie’s old friend, goes in and gets a two page confession. A few hours later, the sheriff suddenly realizes Charlie is a mute due to the chainsaw accident and arrests the coroner after discovering he once butchered a girl in Vietnam during the war. That’s when the coroner reveals Charlie was his partner in the murder, and the coroner committed some murders to try and frame Charlie who has been committing his own murders, a plan that is pretty much absurdly incompetent. That’s ok though, because once the coroner finds out his daughter is in trouble, he knocks out the incompetent deputy and goes to take on Charlie.
In the end the sheriff is horribly wounded, the coroner’s daughter ends up shooting and killing her own dad, the mayor gives some poorly acted bullshit speech about the coroner being the real killer and having impersonated Charlie for some dumb reason, and Charlie is just fine and driving around despite having been set on fire and shot with the horse pistols that the film production crew apparently procured from some Western at some point. Also some bikers are dead because the movie needed something to do for a while.
In short, The Night Brings Charlie is awful. And now, nearly thirty years later, there’s apparently a sequel trying to go into production. God bless America.
There doesn’t seem to be a trailer out there for this movie, so I can’t include one. For shame, Internets.
Movie Reviews by a Mook 