Watch Night Fright For Free

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

NIGHT FRIGHT is not really an accurate title. There is very little night. Instead, the cameraman and director chose to shoot "day for night" which involves filming in broad daylight using tinted lenses on the camera to make it look like night. Shooting in black and white, this can be an effective technique. In color, though, it makes colors look dim and faded. Worse yet, there is no continuity; scenes go from day to night and back again with no rhyme or reason. This might work if some of the scenes took place in Los Angeles and others were set in Eastern Europe. But the geographic area involved is a tiny town near Dallas. And there is not a single fright anywhere to be seen.The plot has been done before and since. A experimental rocket is launched into space, then comes crashing back to Earth. One of the lab animals aboard survives the crash and mutates into a terrible beast that terrorizes the countryside.To be more accurate, it terrorizes a small group of incredibly bad mannered college students, who richly deserve what happens to them, and along the way kills off a few character actors.The town Sheriff tries to restore order. He's played by John Agar, whose brief marriage to Shirley Temple overshadowed his screen work. He's courting a pretty nurse who works at the local hospital. Neither his nor her character is developed enough to involve the viewer.Much has been made of the "bad" acting in the film, and I feel compelled to defend the efforts of the cast. Having lived in Texas all of my life I'm used to the various dialects to be found in the state. Some people in North Texas have a flat pattern to their speech with very little inflection. Besides which, nobody here gets what one would call great dialog.Agar does what he can with the material at hand. He says his lines clearly and stands at the right place at the right time. His career was an interesting one. He had many supporting roles in major studio productions, often in westerns starring John Wayne. IMDB shows him with ninety-six film and tv credits over a fifty-six year career. Had drinking (and arrests for drunk driving) not interfered, he could have had a major career. He figured out that if he were willing to work with Poverty Row studios he could get top billing, and would get paid for a project that would probably have a short shooting schedule.At the end of the day, acting is a job. It's great to be directed by Allan Dwan in SANDS OF IWO JIMA, which received four Academy Award nomination. But a project like NIGHT FRIGHT, directed by James A. Sullivan, got him top billing and a paycheck and a job is a job. A carpenter would rather work on a mansion in Malibu than on a new convenience store on the freeway access road. But, a working man's got to eat and has to feed his family.There are a couple of surprisingly good supporting actors. Bill Thurman, who would go on to play character parts in movies like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, plays Deputy Ben Whitfield, the Sheriff's right hand man who unfortunately forgets that he is carrying a gun at a critical point in the story.But the real scene stealing comes from Roger Ready as Professor Alan Clayton. To start with, he appears to be a truly gifted actor: without much screen time he establishes himself as just a nice, regular guy. He seems perfectly at ease on screen. To establish the Professor's credentials as an intellectual, the director uses one of the oldest cliches in the history of drama: in a couple of scenes, we see him smoking a pipe. This lets Ready draw attention from the main actors in the scene because he is always poking, prodding, scraping, lighting or relighting his pipe. His hands are never still. And if he is speaking and makes a gesture, it is always in his downstage hand and he can use the stem as a pointer. These scenes aren't worth stealing, but it's the thought that counts.It's a shame that the movie looks and sounds so dreary. It just looks cheaped out, with the North Texas locations providing no sense of place. There are too many scenes of trees, sometimes with wind blowing them, in a failed attempt to create suspense.The monster's costume isn't really all that bad. But when we see it in broad daylight, which a lens filter attempts to convince us is moonlight, it just isn't all that good either.

The 1960s were a simpler time when a rampaging space gorilla was enough to enthrall audiences. Or maybe not. I've got no idea how well NIGHT FRIGHT did financially but I can't imagine it did all that great. It's another piece of generic drive-in fodder but, if I'm being honest, this one almost managed to keep my attention. It doesn't help that the copy I watched was horribly degraded from the poorest of transfers and at least half of the movie was incomprehensively dark. I suppose it could've been just poor cinematography but I'm going to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit and assume this was a lot easier to follow when it was originally released in 1967. NIGHT FRIGHT is a creature feature set in a small American town where a space rocket crash lands in the wilderness and unleashes a murderous space gorilla monster on the unsuspecting local populace. This film is a by-the-numbers monster movie that plays out exactly as you expect with the local sheriff leading the charge against the extraterrestrial ape and the town's "teenage" population refusing to see the inherent danger in the situation, allowing them to throw themselves into harm's way. What gives NIGHT FRIGHT a slight edge against the competition is a reasonably decent performance from John Agar as our hero (Sheriff Clint Crawford), the inclusion of Bill Thurman (the one good part to come from 1969 TV movie "It's Alive!") as one of the deputies, and the space ape.I was legitimately surprised to see someone making a decent effort at performing in one of these movies but I guess I underestimated (and had never heard of) John Agar. NIGHT FRIGHT is a movie where it wouldn't surprise me to learn 99% of the cast didn't read the script until right before cameras rolled (and who could blame them) and Agar's Sheriff Crawford feels all the more natural when put in a scene with any of them. He's a stern sheriff with a level head and a desire to keep the community safe. He's aggravated when the Feds roll in to town and refuse him access to the crash site in his own jurisdiction. He mourns for the dead, organizes the final assault against the monster, and even ends the movie as the only person to have gone solo against the beast and walked away alive. Good for him. Bill Thurman is hanging around in the background in the first half of the film as one the handful of deputies under Crawford. While Thurman would go on to bring the fun with his double performance in "It's Alive!" two years after NIGHT FRIGHT, he's toned down to near non-existence here. I almost didn't recognize him without his crazy face, and NIGHT FRIGHT could've used some of his insane cackling. Instead he's generic police force with a future in monkey chow. I sort of wish he'd gotten the role of Sheriff Crawford purely for the fun that could be had in a final battle where he battles a mutant ape. Why not? Go nuts.Anyone else of note in this movie? No, not really. NIGHT FRIGHT has a fun 60's vibe with the town's teenagers (played by no one younger than 25, I'd bet) spouting off the lingo of the era and gathering at the lake for a dance party despite warnings from the police. No, these "kids" aren't going to let the Man get them down. They want to go out to the lake for a groovy time and no one's going to stop them. That dance party, man…we're treated to extensive footage of these "kids" dancing to some generic 60's melody (no money for song rights, I guess) for what feels like forever. We just keep cutting back to the same day-for-night footage of these people twisting and whatnot, probably because the director wanted a reason to keep cutting back to a close-up of one particular girl's butt that we see repeatedly. Groovy? Anyways, the ape: I think it was cool but I have no way of knowing because the footage is so dark that I can hardly make out any details. It truly looks like a costume borrowed from the original "Star Trek"; it's some sort of gorilla with what appears to be a bald head and maybe some ridges? I bet it looked cool in the daylight but we're never lucky enough to find out. Whatever it might be, it loves the taste of teenage flesh and it will require all the strength this little town's police force can muster to bring it down.

John Agar is a B film sci fi and horror legend from the 1950s. By the late 1960s, however, his once renowned B film career had sputtered to even sub-Tor Johnson depths. In the remaining decades of his life he was reduced from B film leading man to (ugh!) B film character actor. One of the last roles that Agar had, as a B film leading man was in 1967's Night Fright.Whereas the B films of the 1950s usually had a slight bit of professionalism left in them, as remnants from the days of studio control, by the late 1960s, B films had fallen into the hands of almost anyone with the will enough to make a film and had a few thousand bucks enough to make one. Sometimes the results could be masterful- think George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead. Most times, though, the results were not just bad, but bad in a haphazard way that showed the filmmaker didn't really give a damn about the film. Say what you will about the films of Ed Wood, but there was an attention to detail that, while poorly done, did exhibit some pride. The same cannot be said of James A. Sullivan's Night Fright.

A murderous mutant ape terrorizes a bunch of party hearty teenagers in the woods of a sleepy Texas town. It's up to stalwart Sheriff Clint Crawford (veteran dime-store cinema regular John Agar at his most endearingly sincere) to figure out a way to kill the bloodthirsty beast. Man, does this clinker possess all the right wrong stuff to qualify as an amusingly awful stinkeroonie: hopelessly all-thumbs (mis)direction by James A. Sullivan, sluggish pacing, stiffly earnest acting by a game, but lame cast, over-aged teens frugging up a storm like rejects from an AIP "Beach Party" flick, zero tension or creepy atmosphere, a cornball score, priceless tin-eared dialogue (Sheriff Crawford to a surly teen: "Look, punk -- don't call me fuzz; when you talk to me call me sheriff"), a meandering narrative, clumsy cinematography that's rife with queasy zoom-ins, primitive fades, and lousy dissolves, a completely fumbled less-than-thrilling "explosive" climax, and a laughable monster played by some poor schmo in a ratty gorilla suit with a cheap plastic fright mask covering his face. Dorothy Davis looks mighty purdy as the feisty Judy while the ubiquitous Bill Thurman has a sizable supporting part as the ill-fated Deputy Ben Whitfield. A real crummy hoot.