By Geno McGahee
OK, let me begin by saying that I am a huge fan of micro-budget horror films. Despite the fact that these films lack in production value and acting talent, I usually find them very entertaining. There is a lot of heart in them and it usually involves a story-teller attempting to use the video medium as the route to get his idea to the masses. I enjoy the look of these sorts of films and when I first began watching THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY, I was excited. It was from 2001, but the look screamed 1980s. Other places have this film being released in 1999. Perhaps they were using a camcorder from the eighties to film this. Whatever the case, I was initially optimistic, but unfortunately, we have a total mess here.
Written and Directed by Jeff Burton, THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY involves a serial killer on the loose and a group of college kids going away camping. I’m apologizing in advance for not having the names of the actors involved in this. The IMDB page is pretty incomplete, but let’s just say that I can sum up the acting overall in this film as terrible. The writing doesn’t help the cause, but the acting is so flat and forced that it’s hard to believe any of these characters.
Sarah is a college girl and she’s out for a run. Fully aware that there is a killer out there, she gets nervous and runs faster, eventually meeting up with David. She kneed him in the nuts out of fear but soon apologized. David is monotone and his talks about vegetarianism and psychology were so boring and pointless. There is an idea that every sentence of the screenplay pushes the story forward. Jeff Burton defied that and proved his rebel ways by just using filler dialogue. Let them talk about anything without much of it pertaining to the story. It was like a found footage but it was shot as a regular feature.
Sarah, her sister, Gwen, David, some tough guy named “Leo,” and a few others travel to go camping and begin telling campfire stories. This is more filler as they set up the final kills of the movie. I kept wondering if this movie even had a screenplay. In the beginning, it credited three people as writers of this and I’m sure that if you sat them together and asked who wrote this, they’d point to one of the other two and say “he did it”! I hate to trash a movie, but when it’s this bad, I can’t allow one of my readers to suffer through it. I took the hit on this one.
Amazingly, this film has no redeeming value. In most films, I can find something and cling to it…the one good characteristic and be happy to give it a few points. Here, we have a terribly predictable slasher with very little slashing and no real story. It took three people to write this? Seriously? OK, I’m sorry. I’m off track here.
THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY is wretched. It’s one of the worst films I have ever seen and I make this one of my must avoid films. It was as bad as it gets.
Rating: 0/10
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You have to admit the first scene where the amateur actress gets killed is the best scene!
I never thought I see or hear anything of this movie again!
~the first scene amateur