Cheap Dead of Night (Video) (Mervyn Johns) (Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton) Price

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Customer Reviews of Dead of Night

ENGLISH SPOOKS
A popular and critical sensation in its time, DEAD OF NIGHT was the first horror film to be released in Britain since the beginning of WWII. It's a splendid anthology of occult stories told by five people in a country house visited by a young architect, who had anticipated the scene in a nightmare. Each recounts a bizarre personal tale, and after hearing the last, the architect strangles the sole remaining guest, a disbelieving psychiatrist. Awakened the next morning, the architect discovers he had dreamed it all.............Or has he? As a lifetime fan of ghost stories and the like, I recommend this movie highly; it's definitely of the best in the genre to this day. Essentially, it's a group of 5 (really four) horror stories loosely and cleverly linked together. The Christmas ghost story is good material a little weakly done; however the haunted mirror sequence (with Googie Withers) is first-rate; actually one of the most gripping ghost stories you'll see in any film. An antique mirror reflects the tortured life of the previous owner (who commited suicide) ......... The knockout finale, however is the brilliant and justly famous climatic ventriloquist sequence with Redgrave. The film evokes rather than depicts horror, and waves its symmetrical spell with the magic of a good script and good direction. Contributing in no small measure to the uncanny mood is the ominous, Wagnerian score by Georges Auric. who had written the music for Jean Cocteau's films. The whimsical golfing episode is ridiculously out of place and it could be completely omitted from all prints and one would never know the difference. There is an obscure 1945 British film entitled "A Place of One's Own" with James Mason and Margaret Lockwood which sounds interesting -a story of spirit possession; I hope it finds it's way to video soon!

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Witness the birth of the horror anthology.
Granted much of Dead Of Night isn't going to hit home with a lot of people. It's old and, as such, doesn't strike a cord with our modern sensibilities (just watch the segment about the two golf players and you'll know what i mean). But in a way, that's good. It's like sitting around with your friends in the... ahem... dead of night and telling each other ghost stories. They may not have a lasting effect on you but when you're there, in the moment, they work under your skin. The movie is more fun than frightening. It also has the most amazing ending I have seen in a long time, more then a typical pay-off. It's like witnessing your own horrific nightmares all coming true at once. The last segment of the film is also it's strongest and deserves to be a classic all by itself, featuring Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist fighting a losing battle with his evil dummy. This brief 15 minutes of film easily qualifies Dead Of Night as a classic of British horror.

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Great Film, Horrible Quality
Each episode of this masterpiece conveys a sense of dread and impending horror. This is achieved by gradually turning reality askew until it's a nightmare. No need for chainsaws and chop-chop. Unfortunately, the print I received must have been pirated by a drunken one-armed lodger with Parkinson's Disease, sitting in a vibrating chair in a dumpy London flat while struggling to keep his Toys R Us video camera trained on the flickering blue screen of a 10-inch Dumont TV situated behind the dirty window of an apartment on the other side of the Thames during a foggy night.