Ten Minutes to Midnight - Movie Review
Full disclosure: I love Caroline Williams. If you’ve read my review of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (the best sequel), you’ll know that she is on my Mount Rushmore of final girls. I’ve long wished to see a follow-up to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 where Stretch takes on the mantle of leather face. I doubt that will ever happen, but I would sure love to write it. Anyway, she stars in this fun flick called Ten Minutes to Midnight.
Ten Minutes to Midnight is an indie horror film written and directed by Erik Bloomquist. Bloomquist is a talented director that found himself in the top 200 directors in the world on Project Greenlight. You have probably seen his work on CryptTV. Needless to say, while he may not have an avalanche of credits on IMDB, he can ball. This film surprised me. I thought it was going to be schlock based on the tiny cast and the limited setting, but I was wrong. This movie is a blast. While it’s not perfect… beauty is found in the flaws.
Let’s discuss.
Ten Minutes to Midnight (10M2M) is an anxiety fever dream. It makes the most of its budget in telling a story about a radio hostess at the end of her career and the end of her rope. She’s walking into the studio to do her last broadcast and much like a star athlete that has lost a step, she realizes that she never had a backup plan. Riding off into the sunset isn’t all its cracked up to be. Oh, and then there’s the problem of being bitten by a bat that either had rabies or is a vampire lord. Either way, shitty end to a run, right?
Bloodbaths, office parties, and solar flares ensue.
Let’s go deeper.
+++Spoilers+++
10M2M is a single location thriller, much like one of my favorite films of all time, Pontypool. Like Pontypool all of the action takes place in a radio station and more to the point the broadcast studio. Our heroine Amy Marlowe (Caroline Williams) arrives to the station and is bit by a bat in the parking lot. We don’t see the bite, we just hear the tail-end of the struggle. Once arrived, she’s locked inside by the paranoid and Uber-annoying security guard Ernie played with gusto by Nicholas Tucci.
As the son of a security guard, I can say that Nicholas Tucci’s performance is almost too real. Many of my father’s subordinates and coworkers were Ernie. Credit to the writers and the actor.
Ernie is sitting at the lobby desk sharpening a 2 x 4 into a stake while filling Amy’s mind with worries about rabies, the hurricane raging outside, and rabies. You didn’t read that wrong. I said rabies twice. That’s a hint, Ernie is going to talk a lot about it, buckle-in. This is the kick off point to the anxiety. The initial, realistic worry of rabies. She’s then subjected to an emasculating meeting with Bob (William Youmans) and Sienna (Nicole Kang) her surprise replacement. You see, Amy didn’t know she was walking into her last show. It’s in this moment that she’s bumrushed with it. She’s being cancelled and replaced by a younger, hardbodied woman who has her claws into Bob. Sienna, for her part is gracious if not sickly sweet. Nicole Kang plays the role of overly positive, go-girl with a robotic ease of a woman who isn’t acting. The best interaction of the scene being her response to Amy’s self deprecating remarks. “You’re beautiful!” is delivered with a Barbie-plastic superficiality that stings. I laughed out loud.
I love Nicole Kang’s face. Not in a Buffalo Bill kind of way, mind you, but her non-verbal delivery is incredible. I was trained in the Meisner Technique when I was in training and it’s all about reactions and delivering the lines with differing inflections to lend layer and nuance to a character. She gets to play Sienna in so many different ways, each time adapting new facial ticks and rhythms.
While Sienna is obviously meant to be an initial foil, she’s not a stereotype neither is she shallow. There’s depth in her vitriol as well as her later fragility. It helps that Nicole Kang and Caroline Williams have heat. Their chemistry is extremely satisfying. A few script tweaks and this could have been an episode of the Red Shoe Diaries…
I’m joking…but Erik, if you make the call, I’m on it.
This is level two of the anxiety elevator, isolation. Amy is surrounded by perceived and actual enemies. There’s her snotty replacement, her sexual harassment caricature of a boss, the security guard obsessed with rabies, and then there’s the bite. The bite that infected her, the bite that drives her to scream a profanity laced tirade into the microphone live on the air, the bite that made her attack Sienna and bit through her wrist, and drove her to consume her blood both from the wrist and from her used tampon in the restroom.
The bloody tampon feast is extremely gross, but also holds a sick credence to the idea of Amy’s attraction to Sienna. Maybe not so much a sexual attraction, but an attraction to being young again. To having the chance to do everything again—better. It reminds me of the only scene people remember from the underrated exploitation flick by Jake West: Razorblade Smile, where the beautiful Eileen Dailey gives cunnilingus to a woman experiencing menstrual bleeding.
The only person she can turn to is her board operator / producer Aaron played by Adam Weppler. Aaron plays up the crush he’s had on Amy since childhood. He has a great monologue about how she was the voice he heard in the middle of sleepless nights. There’s a real sexual tension between the two of them that Amy doesn’t notice until that moment. There’s been harmless flirtation before, but now there’s heat. This is helped by Weppler and Williams’ fantastic chemistry. They make it feel like we’ve known them and their relationship for years. They depend on each other, but as it turns out, this is level 3 of the Anxiety—Codependency. Amy rests all of her psychic weight on Aaron’s shoulder and then experiences irreparable betrayal when Aaron takes Sienna’s side after the attack. Even though Aaron is just doing what anyone would do by providing first aid to the beautiful girl.
Level 4 - Madness. From this point the film becomes Amy’s fever dream. We see shapes in the hallway, Sienna mutating, Ernie yelling rabies facts, Aaron’s personality shifting to vindictive, flashes of Amy’s first night on the job, her naivety about Bob’s intentions with her, mistakes, failure, abandonment. We experience the stages of grief per Kubler-Ross’s famous book. Much like All That Jazz, This film visualizes those stages, given in a much more abbreviated timeframe and with vampires. Every stage is represented, except Acceptance.
Then the Red Phone rings and Amy talks to her younger self. She gives he the advice she wished she’d known. She pours her heart into the phone receiver. Caroline Williams gives the best performance of her career in this scene. It’s heartfelt, sorrowful, and it feels like she is venting some of her own frustrations. Just like her tirade of the air felt like a venting of her pent up aggression at internet trolls and annoying, clingy horror-con fans, this scene feels like a woman who knows her time in the spotlight isn’t forever. That she’s reached the age of wisdom and reflection. She reaches acceptance.
The film resets, Amy walks into the studio, and all the actors have switched roles. All of the actors amp up their performances by another level as well. Weppler plays Ernie with an even more over-the-top gusto than Tucci, Kang plays the sex-hungry Bob like a boss, and Tucci plays Sienna too well. It’s actually chuckle inducing, especially when Kang is dryhump-dancing Tucci with as little rhythm as a Boomer. This is how Amy experiences acceptance… a horrible office retirement party filled with spooks and ghouls, where the main event is her being interred in a coffin. It’s a sad end, made worse by her acceptance that nobody she worked with ever cared about her and due to her graveyard time slot—she never made a life outside of the station. She doesn’t have anyone to go home to. She’s in a coffin of her own making.
The movie could have ended here and been a nice ambiguous character study, but its taken further when the morning host comes into the station to find it blood soaked and abandoned. That is until he opens the bathroom door and finds the mangled bodies of everyone we met last night. Above them hangs a large, shrieking bat that flies at his face.
This ending is just as ambiguous, but throws a wrench into my theory of what actually happened in the film. I perceived that Amy was in a mental hospital, imprisoned for attacking an intern at the station after a nervous breakdown. With the bat appearing, we find that there’s really only a couple of options. Either Amy indeed was bitten by a vampire and she is now an immortal MILF on the hunt for love, or that Amy experiences this day twice in the midst of her own death. Her body isn’t seen in the bathroom with the others. Perhaps she was bleeding to death outside after being the first victim. Since she has no life outside of the station, she experiences her grief in a bad day at the office.
This is a film that outperforms its budget. From the get go, the film grain and lighting makes this look closer to a Tarantino film than a Charles Band production. The music by Gyom Amphoux is reminiscent of recent great soundtracks by Disasterpiece and Steve Moore. The acting by the entire cast of relative nobodies is outstanding, especially Nicole Kang. I hope she stays in the Horror genre, because we need more diverse heroines and villains and I think she would be great at both. Then there’s Caroline Williams. This film is a tribute to her in every way. From the setting as a radio host and DJ, homage to her signature role of Stretch in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, to the range of emotions she’s asked to portray. This is her shining moment. It helps that she’s gorgeous and the elder-stateswoman of Punk ramps up the heat, special kudos to whoever put her in a Murderdolls shirt. I thought I was the only person who remembered that band!
Long Story Short…
Too Late.
Ambiguous as it is, this film is a new take on the vampire sub-genre. Much like Stephen King’s The Night Flyer took the basic elements of the vampire stories and adapted them to the modern world with only a slight variation, so does Erik Bloomquist with Ten Minutes to Midnight.
Check this movie out.
Currently it’s streaming free on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
