2/10
If Christopher Nolan had watched this movie as a young man, he would have pursued a career in accounting.
19 August 2010
Warning: Spoilers
This gobstoppingly stupid film is a monument to the awful business that is filmmaking. It is vulgar, pretentious, preposterous, leaden, ridiculous and makes you wonder why anyone would want to get into the movies.

Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester) is a fashion photographer who is plagued by horrible dreams of killing the same woman every night. Then that woman shows up at his door and they fall in lust. They have a lot of sex and after watching this film for about an hour and a half, you suddenly discover it's really a science-fiction story. I usually go more into depth on the plot of a movie, to give you a real sense of what it's like. In this case, however, it would just be a waste of my time and yours.

In that spirit, let me just briefly touch on what's wrong with The Cold of the Night.

1. Jeff Lester is a fairly good looking guy, but the minute he opens his mouth he becomes completely unappealing. He's supposed to be the hero, but he comes off like the dick that the hero is supposed to overcome at the end of the movie. Adrianne Sachs, who plays the woman from Scott's dreams, is not at all attractive. She has a couple of nice fake breasts and we do get to see a lot of them, but Shannon Tweed outshines her by a mile in a much smaller role. Tweed even gets naked for a sex scene, though we only get to see one of her boobs. How did Lester and Sachs ever get these lead roles? Were they both having sex with the producer? How could they not tell after the first day of shooting that Marc Singer or David Soul or almost any other guy in the cast would have been better than Lester? How can you have Shannon Tweed on the set and not notice how much prettier she is than Sachs? Heck, even middle-aged Tipi Hedren would have been a better choice.

2. The script is something a middle schooler would have come up with after huffing glue during recess. It starts out trying to be a psychological thriller, but succeeds only in eliciting laughter. Then it morphs into a softcore romance but while the nudity is plentiful, it has all the arousal of a National Geographic video on yaks humping. It finally tries to finish off as an action flick, yet Old Order Amish would consider these action scenes boring. I didn't even try and keep track of all the inconsistencies and illogic in the story because I was afraid I'd start bleeding out of my eyes.

3. This movie is filled with things that are just head-turningly odd. A glowing water bed! The use of marbles as a sex toy! Scott's preoccupation with pizza! An Oedipal reference! The clapper! The world's most inappropriate lunch with a girl's mother! David Soul drinking coffee! Women who don't mind being involuntarily choked during sex! And whatever the hell Marc Singer's doing in this piece of crap! He was the Beastmaster, for pity's sake!

Shannon Tweed and Marc Singer have made this exact sort of film many times in their careers. Some of them were even pretty good for trashy sex and violence tales. They only have bit roles in The Cold of the Night and this film is pretty bad, even by the low standards of the trashy sex and violence genre.

You have been warned.
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