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Night Fright (1967)

     Night Fright, not to be confused with actual good movie Fright Night, tells the story of the aftermath of a government experiment to test the effects of cosmic rays on animals by sending a bunch into space. The rocket crash lands back on earth, unleashing a giant evil monster that roams around in the woods killing people. It's basically like a bad horror movie version of the Fantastic Four. We follow the local sheriff as he hunts down the murderous creature and eventually kills it by blowing it up with a landmine. Now that you know the basic gist of things, let's dig into this pile of cinematic garbage.
     One of the biggest issues with Night Fright is really no fault of the movie's, it's that the audio quality is terrible and the picture is ten times worse. I can't really blame them, given the time and budget, but it does definitely hurt the overall enjoyment of the film from a modern perspective. Another big problem is something that's very common in old (especially low budget) horror movies, that I talked about in the Snowbeast review. The movie is plagued with long scenes that go on forever where nothing happens. The most egregious offender is a scene where a bunch of teenagers are partying by a lake. It's basically just ten minutes of shots of kids dancing, and ten minutes is a big deal, that's like a seventh of the movies run time. Yeah, it's only an hour and fifteen minutes long. There's also a lot of ass shots in this scene, I'll leave you to decide if that's a pro or a con.  Also, no one in this movie seems to have peripheral vision. The monster often sneaks up on people from the side, and they never notice until it's right upon them.
     Now, of course, the most important thing about any monster movie is obviously the monster, so how is Night Fright's monster? Well, it's a bit of a mixed bag. As I said before, the movie is only an hour and fifteen minutes long, and the monster shows up at the 46 minute mark.  That's only 29 minutes of monster!  But, to be fair, after we first see the monster,  he shows up a lot. Act three is choked-full of awesome scenes of the monster chasing people around and beating up cops, and to make things even better, the monster costume is awesome! It's like a big gorilla thing with a weird lizard face and horns, it's so rad. However, there's one big problem. Nearly every scene with the monster is in the dark and in the woods, shot on a terrible camera from the 60's. As a result, you can barely ever see the monster well, which really sucks, 'cause, like I said, the monster is super cool!
     I'm not sure if I can recommend this movie, as the first 46 minutes (well over half the film) are pretty boring. Maybe just skip to the 46 minute mark, if that's something you can do in good conscious. I'd like to close this review with a couple interesting facts about Night Fright: in the 80's, Night Fright was re-released on VHS under the title E.T.N.: Extraterrestrial Nasty (not a joke) and on Night Fright's Wikipedia page, the film's editing is accredited to Arthur Sullivan, famed English operetta composer who died 67 years before Night Fright was released. The film's actual editor was also named Arthur Sullivan, but the article links his name to the composer Arthur Sullivan. I highly doubt anyone will ever care enough about Night Fright to notice or fix it. I know I certainly don't.

STATISTICS

1st Death: 2:30
1st Monster Appearance: 46:01
Kill Count: 4

BEST QUOTE

Rex: "This is our private blast, and if you don't dig it, split!"

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