I first saw this in the early 90s on a vhs.

Revisited it recently.

The movie has lots of stupidity but it is creepy n atmospheric at times.

One of the best part is that most of the movie is shot in broad daylight n the night scenes r well shot.

The director of this movie John Russo is the writer of NOTLD (1968),n he incorporated the cemetary scene in this one too with almost the same atmosphere.

Some really wtf moments - A stupid girl hides in the shower n can't even out run a fat slob killer.

Check out the scene at 1:30:52.

The guy who is shot is standing as if he is like a mannequin.

Luke the big, bald guy conveniently stands on the place where kerosene has been sprinkled by the final girl.

Midnight is the movie Rob Zombie keeps trying to make. It's seriously demented and filled with so many truly unlikeable characters. Most of them make you want to take a shower just watching them.

Written and directed by John Russo, one of the creators of Night of the Living Dead, Midnight was shot on location outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and features special effects by Tom Savini. While never prosecuted, the film was seized and confiscated in the UK as a section 3 video nasty.

How can you not love a movie that starts with a girl caught in an animal trap getting killed by a bunch of children who all pray to Satan while they murder her? And hey look - one of the killers is John Amplas, Martin in the flesh.

Midnight is really about Nancy Johnson, who runs away from home after her police officer stepfather Bert (Lawrence Tierney, berserk as always) tries to assault her. She gets picked up by two guys, Hank and Tom, who also grab a Baptist preacher and his daughter.

As they stop to see the preacher's wife's grave, the older man is soon killed. To top that off, the killer delivers the body to his daughter's door and then kills her with the same machete.

After racists in the town refuse to serve Hank, the three heroes steal groceries before they're stopped by some even more racist cops. The two men are quickly gunned down and Nancy goes on the run. Of course, the house she ends up in just so happens to be the one where her friends are being cut into pieces.

The movie then descends into even more depravity, like locking our heroine in a cage to witness a Black Mass, her insane stepfather tracking her down and finally, our heroine discovering herself in time to wipe everyone out with extreme malice.

The original ending had the crazed family - who had already killed the cops and stolen their uniforms - getting away with the murders. However, the distributors demanded that the film have a more uplifting ending, which is why the one that is in here happens so quickly. It works for me - it's really shocking.

While the film was released as Backwoods Massacre, I'd compare it to more of a Western Pennsylvania Texas Chainsaw Massacre in tone.

When drunken cop Bert Johnson (Lawrence Tierney) makes sexual advances towards his teenage stepdaughter Nancy (the rather boyish Melanie Verlin),she packs her bags and sets off to see her sister in California, hitching a ride with Tom and Hank (John Hall and Charles Jackson),two college students on their way to Florida (!?!?). After a night camping out under the stars, the trio fall foul of a family of redneck Satanists who are ritually sacrificing young women to try and resurrect their dead mother.

With a screenplay and direction from John A. Russo, writer of seminal horror classic Night of the Living Dead, and make-up effects from genre legend Tom Savini, one might reasonably expect Midnight to deliver the goods in terms of terror and gore, but sadly it fails to deliver on both counts: Russo's script, based on his own novel, suffers from a dreadfully dull first half and the guy is clearly no Romero when calling the shots behind the camera, consistently failing to deliver the requisite chills; Savini also disappoints, his gore FX on this project being far from his best work (I can only presume that he knocked them out on the cheap as a favour to Russo).

It's not all a total loss though: the film's pace picks up considerably once Nancy and pals meet the devil-worshipping backwoods clan (a memorable group consisting of two nutters posing as cops, a demented babe, and a fat guy in dungarees who can't stop laughing),and bonus points are scored for a willingness to tackle the taboo, a few surprisingly brutal deaths, and a cool grind-house vibe achieved through cruddy picture quality and a menacing, lo-fi synthesiser score (the horribly dated theme song, on the other hand, is simply atrocious and only serves to irritate).

5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.