Gimmfest 2020 Review: TEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
If you have any expectations going into director Erik Bloomquist‘s Ten Minutes To Midnight, then I suggest that you leave them at the door. On the surface, Bloomquist’s film is a vampire horror picture, but it’s really so much more than that. It’s a film about growing old, moving on and the fear of change.
Nearly 35 years after she last stepped into the DJ booth in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, Caroline Williams plays a radio host who has a very bad night at work indeed. Williams is Amy Marlowe, a late night radio host whose shift gets off to a bad start when she’s bitten by a bat (potentially rabid) on her way to work. Trapped in the building as a storm rages outside, Amy discovers that she’s going to be dumped from her show and replaced by a younger host (Nicole Kang). As the pressure of the evening mounts Amy gets to breaking point – and that’s when things turn deadly.
Written by Erik Bloomquist and his brother, Carson Bloomquist Ten Minutes To Midnight is a low budget film which really surprises. The script is loaded with dark humour and horror, but it also has a serious amount of pathos. Bloomquist and company have smuggled a lot into the film under the guise of the horror genre and the film’s central theme of ageing and being put out to pasture really rings true.
Caroline Williams excels in the lead role and you really buy her history as the late night DJ who has three decades of airtime under her belt. We know that Williams has the chops for horror, but she’s also great on a dramatic level here and Ten Minutes To Midnight gives the actress a lot of material she can sink her teeth into (no pun intended). The other cast members of Bloomquist’s film also do good work and the film marks the final screen appearance of the late Nicholas Tucci as a nerdy security guard, a role a million miles away from his turn in Bloomquist’s last film, Long Lost.
Ten Minutes To Midnight is a surprising horror film which has a lot to offer. It’s well crafted and well performed and well worth watching.
