The Night Before Easter (2014)

Directed by Joseph Henson [Other horror films: N/A] & Nathan Johnson [Other horror films: N/A]

While The Night Before Easter isn’t a terrible offering of low budget horror, and certainly not that time-consuming, I have to say that I wasn’t overly enthralled. The basic idea is fun, but it seems there was far more drama than there was killing, and while that helped build some of the characters, I’m not sure it did the overall movie great favors.

The plot here, or more specifically, the setting (being a storage facility) reminded me a bit of another lower-budget film, The Murder Game (from 2006), which also took place in a similar setting. That had probably the same amount of characters as this one did, but I also thought the story was a bit more solid, and while this film does boast a killer in a bunny suit, I tend to think The Murder Game was more memorable also.

As it was, the kills here are okay. Someone gets a saw blade thrown into their back, another takes an ax to the face, leaving  gnarly gash. There’s a throat-slitting, along with a decapitated head, so there’s a bit here if that’s your main interest, but a lot of these kills don’t happen until the second half, and it’s not really until the final ten or so minutes that things really start going.

To be fair, the movie’s a short one. The Night Before Easter runs at just over an hour – 65 minutes total. It’s easily digestible, but even with the time spent building some of the characters (such as Kelly’s infatuation with Riley, or Riley’s opening of a comic book store, or Brooke’s drinking problem), I feel like some of the characters here just don’t get much spotlight, and either could have been cut or given a bit of a chance to explore their backgrounds.

As far as performances go, I think that April Sinclair was the most note-worthy, and her scenes with Alyssa Matusiak were perhaps the most interesting non-murder scenes of the movie. I thought both did quite well with troubled characters. Keldon Flint (“She called me Danti!”) was amusing at times, Bonnie Marilyn Jean played the stereotypically bitchy girl well, and Emily Chidalek had some strong moments early on. I do sort of wish we got a little more from Eric Wyatt – he was okay, but I definitely thought his character could have been fleshed out a bit more.

Otherwise, there’s not really a lot going for The Night Before Easter. It’s an okay lower-budget film, and it can be fun at times, but there’s a lot of other lower budget films from the same time-range I’d probably want to spend my time with instead (such as Don’t Go to the Reunion, Silver Cell, You’re Not Getting Out Alive, and Vampire Ticks from Outer Space), and I don’t know if this film will end up being all that memorable.

5.5/10