10 to Midnight
1983 Directed by J. Lee Thompson
Synopsis
Forget what’s legal...do what’s right!
Veteran cop Leo Kessler (Charles Bronson) tracks down a serial killer and places fake evidence trying to convict him. This is discovered and the killer is released. Who then goes after Kessler's daughter for revenge.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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Sleazy, cheezy, bloody thriller from Bronson. I love this film. Crazed psycho makes prank phone calls and gets naked when stabbing gratuitously (also) naked girls to death. Lisa Eilbacher plays Bronson's daughter and just wants to check Andrew Stevens' prostate. Ola Ray shows off her tits (which is probably why Michael Jackson cast her in his THRILLER video). Kelly Preston is here before her Scientology days and two years before she bared all in MISCHIEF. Ridiculously fun and trashy. You just can't NOT love a film that has Bronson screaming about a masturbation machine.
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Charles Bronson plays a hard-boiled cop who, along with his irritating new young partner (Andrew Stevens), is hunting a serial killer (Gene Davis) who likes stabbing scantily clad women while in the nude.
J Lee Thompson (who, lest we forget. was responsible for the likes of Cape Fear and Ice Cold In Alex amongst many other good earlier films) directed about four trillion films like this from the late 70s to the late 80s, with all but one of them starring Charles Bronson and all but one of them featuring him having a dysfunctional relationship with a son or daughter. Bronson also starred in about 11 trillion of these kinds of films with other directors.
You would wander into the…
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I watched this movie a few years back and kind of hated it. I guess I wasn't prepared for this to be a serial killer/slasher/police procedural hybrid. I think I was more hoping for a Charlie Bronson action film.
But revisiting it for the Cannon Fodder column, I appreciate the film a lot more. The villain is super weird and constantly naked, which is disturbing. Bronson gets involved in a little bit of a cat and mouse with the killer which is fun.
The violence is pretty graphic and I see this as a bit of a predecessor to SEVEN and I SAW THE DEVIL, albeit WAY worse than either of those.
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WTF, this movie is insanely creepy and so gross!!!! A serial killer goes around town killing scantily clad women in the nude!!!! He gets off by killing them when he's naked??? Did you hear me guys??? The guy who plays the serial killer is probably the best serial killer ever committed to celluloid...
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A bit of a departure really from his usual output of this time as this is pretty much a straight police thriller mixed with a slasher movie, but more in the vein of a sleazy exploitation movie than a Friday The 13th clone. There isn’t really much action as say Murphy’s Law or a Death Wish sequel, which is kind of what I was expecting at first, but was pleasantly surprised when it delivered a solid and sleazy serial killer movie.
The fact that the killer murders his victim in the nude is a nice sleazy touch and Gene Davis who plays him puts in a great manic performance. I thought this was the first time i’d ever seen him…
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Charles Bronson is at his best in this lurid exploitation picture about the hunt for a vicious sex killer who looks like a giant Ken doll.
It has all the staples you would expect from the genre, star and - more importantly - Reagan era period. It criticizes a limp, liberal system that has gone far too soft on these maniac criminals, who all deserve to just be blown away by Charles Bronson.
Bronson is, of course, the no nonsense cop with the young rookie partner (played by Andrew Stevens - who, soon after this, would go on to be a lucrative producer of soft core thrillers for CINEMAX). There is a really great scene, early on, where he reveals…
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Death Wish lite. See Death Wish 1-3 (maybe 4) before you bother with this. It's better than Death Wish 5 at least, but not by much.
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10 to Midnight is by no means a great film, but I'll be damned if it wasn't entertaining as hell. You have a serial killer that gets fully nude to chase down and kill his victims, and you have Charles Bronson tracking down the killer and trying to stop him by any means necessary. The film has a real sleaziness to it, but it's never overly indulgent (though director J. Lee Thompson goes out of his way to creatively hide the killer's junk). 10 to Midnight is no masterpiece, but it's a fun watch and that's all I wanted out of it.
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Amazingly sleazy and hysterically reactionary, but if J. Lee Thompson had pushed things just a little more over the top it could have been a minor camp classic (though admittedly it's hard to imagine how a movie with a bare-assed naked serial killer and a girl who hits on a guy by offering to check his prostate could be more over the top - but I'm sure Michael Winner would have found a way). As is, mostly of interest for Bronson's constant expression of cynical bemusement, his default mode in pretty much all the cornball exploitation movies he made for Cannon Pictures in the 80s and one of those fabled axioms of cinema that render bad movies into bad poetry.
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I make poor decisions.
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A disappointing revisit. For all its cult status as a politically incorrect right-wing conservative 80s nudity'n'violence VHS-era classic 10 TO MIDNIGHT is mostly pretty dull and slow moving.
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Charles Bronson takes matters into his own hands. Sometimes, the law isn't enough. Not much to say other than it's a solid, if rather predictable, little thriller. Bronson kicks butt, and the soundtrack is properly 80's.
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Boy, that guy sure loved running around naked and stabbing girls with a knife.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.