By Geno McGahee
In film, you need to catch the viewer’s attention in the first ten minutes or you may lose them. The producers of the 1982 film ‘NIGHT WARNING’ understood that and added a little extra just to make sure. I can’t think of many films that begin better than this.
We start off with a couple on the road and their breaks are gone. The man tries desperately to control the car and he’s doing OK, but he eventually runs into a logging truck and a huge log beheads him. It was outstanding and they knew it…which is why they made sure to show his head flying off twice. They were proud of it and they should have been.
The woman climbs over the headless driver and tries to control the car but it falls off a cliff and lands upside down in some water. Maybe…just maybe, she survived. Nope. The car then explodes. So, we have a beheading and a car explosion in the first ten minutes. What a way to begin!
The dead couple had a child named ‘Billy’ (Jimmy McNichol), who is adopted by his Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell), and that is when it gets really weird. Time passes and now Billy is 17 and ready to move on with his life, but Cheryl will have none of it. She wakes up her nephew by scratching him and purring like a kitten. It was disturbing. She has a thing for her nephew apparently and every time that she did something sexual toward him, I cringed.
When Billy decides that he is leaving the home for college, his aunt snaps. Cheryl puts her foot down, but he is determined. When a repairman shows up at the house, this movie puts it into high gear. Cheryl corners the repair man and comes onto him, but he wants none of her. His rejection leads her to grab a knife and stab him to death. She tells the authorities that he tried to rape her, but when it turns out that he was gay, the theory from Detective Carlson (Bo Svenson) gets some traction. The homophobic Dick thinks that Billy was having a homosexual sexual relationship with the repairman and they had a tiff leading to the death. Carloson’s hatred of homosexuals may have skewed his perspective.
Cheryl’s world begins to fall apart as Billy separates from her. He has a girlfriend and is going to be leaving. That puts her into a rage. At one point, she beats his girlfriend with a hammer and then kills one of her own good friends with a machete across the gut. She begins running around with a huge smile on her face, ready to kill again. Tyrrell really played this role well. She was great fun as the crazy aunt.
In the end, Billy must take on his aunt, but it won’t be easy. Some twists and turns and a surprising death at the end make NIGHT WARNING a winner. I really enjoyed it.
Rating: 7/10
