The Midnight After (2014) 2h 4m

It's been a while since we've had any C-Horror on this blog.  Come to think of it, it's been a while since I've had any horror from Japan, Korea, or China.  I guess it's just how the dice roll sometimes when it comes to these reviews.

Imagine boarding a full mini-bus and while en route to your destination all signs of humanity vanish.  This is the plot of The Midnight After.  While passing through a tunnel there is a moment where everyone on the bus blinks at the same time and suddenly cars and people everywhere disappear.  In addition to this mystery, some of remainders that still exist begin to die in strange ways, such as their body parts just turning to dust.  Theories come from every angle among those that still live.

This film had a lot going on.  My issue is that some of it didn't seem to go anywhere, leaving me with a lot of questions.  There's a whole section revolving around David Bowie's Space Oddity which leads to a thin thread of something else but the source is never discovered.  The existence of Japanese men in gas masks gets discussed but we don't get a concrete reason as to why they have a presence in Hong Kong.  There's a strange time loss/memory loss section introduced with one of the characters too that is quickly forgotten.

The Midnight After also contains a rape scene which turns into a necro-rape scene after the woman succumbs to whatever is killing people.  This later outs one of the survivors as a scumbag.  I'm pretty sure this whole scene is meant to have a "Lord of the Flies" twinge insomuch as morality and punishment is defined by those alive.

Aside from the confusion and sexual assault scene, The Midnight After was okay.  They did a great job of making you invested with each of the survivors by the end of the film.  The characters were diverse enough to keep each of their dialog interesting and the light comedic elements did break things up.  I will say the character of Fat got on my nerves since he was the defacto leader by sheer jerkitude.

I give The Midnight After 2 Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie's out of 5:

Demon Inside (a.k.a. Espectro) (2013) 1h 33m

Instead of an intro here I'm giving more of a trigger warning.  If you are uncomfortable with scenes of sexual assault/rape then avoid this film.  I'm not saying I'm okay with it but the film pretty much started with a really long and uncomfortable scene of this.  In truth, this film could have skipped it or done it differently to still have this tiny part of the plot happen.

Demon Inside is a Mexican film where our main character is a psychic/tarot card reader that focuses on helping people with her gifts.  After a violent sexual assault, her trauma leads to her being admitted to a facility.  Upon her release she is afraid to leave her home.  It doesn't help that her neighbor is an insane and possibly murderous woman.  We also find out that the man that attacked her was cleared of the charges.

Our psychic begins to see visions of a bloody woman in her home.  After some research she discovers that there was a murder in her building and assumes the person is reaching out for help.  In truth, they're visions of her own future, but you don't find this out until the end.

For most of this film I felt lost.  It wasn't just the subtitles (which were sub-par and occasionally word-for-word translations as opposed to contextual translations), but it was also the story telling.  The whole film was meant to build up a bunch of info that only gets sewn together at our main character's realization that the woman she had been seeing was herself.  They're lucky that I made it that far without falling asleep.

I give Demon Inside 1 bad looking Illustrator demon out of 5:

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