Scott LeBrun "Midnight Mass" opens with a promising three and a half minutes or so of news footage, showing how the world has been overtaken by a plague that has turned many people into vampires. Some of the humans that are left get dubbed "Vichys", because they've turned traitor and assisted the vampires for the purpose of extending their own life spans. Among those who are struggling to survive are the alcoholic former priest Joe Cahill (Douglas Gibson), and his young friend Gwen Waters (Pamela Karp), a devout atheist. The main dude that they're fighting is a Father Palmeri (Marvin W. Schwartz), who obviously doesn't mind forsaking being a man of God in order to live life as a blood sucker.Horror fans might be encouraged by the idea of author F. Paul Wilson ("The Keep") co- adapting one of his own stories. But while the premise isn't a bad one, the execution is simply boring. In the hands of co-writer / director / special makeup effects creator Tony Mandile, "Midnight Mass" doesn't offer anything truly unusual or interesting. For one thing, some of these annoying Vichys adopt the Goth look, and they fail to be very intimidating or entertaining at all. The gore by Mandile and others *is* passable, but it won't knock viewers out of their socks, either. It's all treated with an incredible amount of sincerity, and some people might appreciate the arc of the Gwen character. The haunting music score composed by John Angier will make you think that you're watching a better movie than you are. The script often focuses more on talk - including philosophical and theological debates - than action.The performances are all highly amateurish if sincere enough, but the characters are still pretty nondescript. Schwartz hams it up something fierce; Gibson is a dull hero. Director Mandile plays Finnegan; Wilson also appears on camera as Noah Randall.This wouldn't be something that this viewer would really recommend, no matter how much of a genre junkie an interested party might be.Five out of 10.

originalvampire I'm a fan of F. Paul Wilson. I'm a die-hard Repairman Jack fan and I certainly hope that when he decides to put Jack in an actual film, he won't allow the dick(s) that massacred this story to do it. The novel Midnight Mass was truly an ass-kicker. So many of the critical characters were left out of this film. It is not hard to write a script from a novel and maintain all or at least most of the characters. The only positive thing I can say about this film is the lead in sequence of news footage. That was the best way to describe the vampire takeover of the world. The rest of it, needs to go back to the drawing board. This was obviously a rushed project without any serious thought being given to the book. F. Paul Wilson should be ashamed and the writers of this script should have a foot put up their asses and given a twist!

kaiju0 Please be aware, my review is very biased, as I fell in love with the writing of F Paul Wilson many years ago. As far as I am concerned the novella "Midnight Mass" (available in many different collections) is one of the finest vampire stories ever written. I have read that Wilson was happy with this adaptation, and I can appreciate that, but I'm going to call this out as one of the worst, and I mean the very worst "films" I've ever seen. A story as good as "Midnight Mass" deserves a better effort than this one.There are those who object to the "pro-christian" slant this movie takes. I have a difficult time understanding that. As an atheist who adores the mythology of the vampire, one cannot ignore the relationship between Christianity and the European vision of the vampire. I love it! I love the idea that something as simple and yet complicated as faith can be the greatest weapon against evil. Read the story and tell me that the sequence involving the transmogrification isn't amazing. To actually witness what amounts to a modern miracle is a fascinating concept. Tie that in to the concept that vampires have weaknesses against that which is Holy and you've got an amazing story. I strongly urge you to read the novella and the other works of Wilson, I'm a huge fan. Remember, if we buy enough of his books, Hollywood will finally commit to making a decent version of one of his works, right?

jhs39 Initially promising vampire movie opens with a montage sequence of television news programs detailing the death of civilization as we know it--a disease that starts in the Middle East and spreads throughout the world, wiping out huge swaths of population in every country as a result. By the end of the newscasts we find that the disease has finally devastated the USA and that the disease story was actually a cover--the real culprit for all the death and devastation was vampires. The intriguing opening suggests that this might be for vampire movies what 28 Days was for zombie movies--an attempt to inject some fresh life into a very tired horror genre--but then the movie proper actually starts and it takes about forty five seconds for all of that initial promise to disappear. Bad production values and laughably awful acting sink Midnight Mass completely. The script has some good ideas, but it hardly matters when the rest of the movie is so poorly made. Fans of evangelical Christian movies might enjoy this, though, since the material is quite a bit more aggressively Christian than most vampire movies--in large part the script seems designed to show a plucky young female atheist the error of her ways and make her pay in the end for her unforgivable lack of faith. While I said previously that the script had some good ideas, this wasn't one of them. If bad acting and Christian sermonizing are your thing, by all means see Midnight Mass. If you want to see a scary horror movie, take a pass.