Night Fright - 1967

I apologize for taking extraordinarily long to write this review and finish this movie.  I realize I talked about this all the way back in Star Knight, as this was the next movie in the boxset I was watching.  Side talk here, why is is boxset not a word?  I get the red squiggly guy under it and it wants it to be box set.  But I think we should accept boxset as a word.  Like a portmanteau, you know, except you're not shortening anything....

Anyways, what I did was start Night Fright on the DVD, get distracted, not finish it, then forget I had started it altogether, watch other things for the next few days/weeks, and then finally re-read my blog (hey, someone has to read it right?  I might as well be the only one) and realize I never finished Night Fright.  Of course, I did rewatch most of the footage I'd already seen, apparently I was 40 minutes in when I'd stopped, but I didn't remember anything after 23 minutes in.

This movie is the king of forgettable, that's for sure.  This movie, I had to double check here, was not a Corman produced movie, but damn does it feel like it.  It feels like some incredibly bland copycat movie.  You know how you go into the store, and you find like Coca Cola, and then there's the store's version?  It's like that.  This movie is essentially the Shasta Cola of movies.  It may be incredibly cheap, but also has no taste, less caffeine, and basically is nowhere near as well known.  Now notice I stayed away from the word "good" cause I dunno if Coke qualifies as good, but since millions of people drink it, throw in good too.

I feel like some of the screen shots I've put in don't necessarily captivate the movie that well.  Cause, well they're normally of something happening, whether it's the monster, or nudity, or whatever.  I took a specific screen shot in this movie to try and captivate the whole movie in one image.  Here it is:

Yes, this shot is Night Fright.  Under lit, poorly shot, out of focus...yes, this shot is Night Fright.  A picture here truly is worth 1000 words.

John Agar stars as a cop in some podunk town where some restless teens are roaming around gettin' in all sorts o' tangles, and a spaceship lands.  There is some giant weird monster guy that appears out the ship and starts slaughtering peeps.  The idiot teenagers have pointless interactions as hero Rex and his bossy girlfriend try to save everyone, and John Agar really hams it up as the big man in charge.

The movie is really this badly lit for most of it, the recording equipment was apparently bought from the local dollar store, and it shows.  The monster actually looks pretty cool too - it's supposed to be some giant mutated alligator thing. The only problem, it's never shown in a way where we can actually see what it looks like, this is another case where the bad editing, bad lighting, and terrible camera work make it worse than it needed to be.

All in all, it's definitive 60's trash, grade Z sci fi horror with zero difference factor, which is why it get's a slamminnnnn 2 stars.