The Night Brings Charlie

The Night Brings Charlie (1990)

Dir. Tom Logan

Written by Bruce Carson

Starring Kerry Knight, Aimie Tenaglia, Joe Fishback, Monica Simmons, David Carr, “and Chuck Whitings as Charlie”

Let us pause, friends, to consider the beauty of simple things. A pint of stout on brisk Fall evening. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. No matter what changes in this crazy topsy-turvy world, some things will always stay the same; pure, simple, uncomplicated. I mean, hell, I just like saying it: THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. It’s the kind of phrase you can tinker with the emphasis to create new subtle layers of meaning. The Night... Brings Charlie. The Night Brings... Charlie. The Night Brings Charlie. It’s like a haiku.

Now, if this was just another 80’s slasher, I wouldn’t bother to tell you it was simple and pure and old fashioned as momma’s apple pie, you would just assume it was, and you would be right. But THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE isn’t an 80’s slasher. It’s from fucking 1990. And it’s not like it was shot in 1986 and sat unreleased for years or something. This is 1990 through and through, and you can even tell from the ugly, overlit photography. I don’t know specifically what happened, but sometime between sundown on December 31st, 1989 and sunrise on January 1, 1990, the knowledge of how to light a film so it doesn’t look like the inside of a Wal-Mart vanished collectively from human memory, and remained gone for almost a full 20 years. Even in Italy! It was a dark time for film (or, actually, an overlit time).

This matters a great deal for civilization, and it certainly serves to ensure that THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE stays far away from any possibility of being the kind of primal, amygdala-punishing, adrenaline-soaked crucible that defines the slasher genre at its best. But somehow I don’t think that was really what the makers of THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE were shooting for anyway. I started to form this theory right around the four-minute mark, when Charlie’s first victim is discovered (by the way, Charlie gets his first kill within a minute of the credits ending; The Night may bring Charlie, but he shows up ready to work) and the paper-deliverer who finds the body looks directly into the camera and screams like this:

And so, within the first five minutes of screentime, THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE tells us what it’s all about: being a simple, straightforward goofy slasher with no ambitions whatsoever other than to chop up as many horny teens as possible and maybe have one crazy twist just so you don’t get too comfortable. It knows the score, it knows you know the score, it merely wants to sing the old song one more time with feeling. This is what CHARLIE sets out to do, and this is what it accomplishes, in a sleek hour and fifteen minutes (and considering director Tom Logan's other 1990 movie was the unbearable SHAKMA, these otherwise modest goals seem altogether audacious in context). If you would like that, you would probably like this. 

The details make it pretty funny, and sometimes even intentionally so. There’s a minor Shelley-esque character who jumps out of the bushes to scare his friends literally the day after their mutual friend was beheaded. There’s a merry mixup where a group of girlfriends decide to go spend the night in the killer’s evil abandoned hideout, but then they all call each other at the last minute and flake out, only they can’t get in touch with their one friend but figure what the hell, she’ll figure it out when she gets there alone in the dead of night. And most notably, there’s a sequence where the killer stalks one of those young women who like to shower at night on the ground floor of their home with all the windows (including a window which is actually inside the shower!) wide open. Granted, all that sounds pretty standard and easy to relate to, but the funny part is that she’s drinking a Pepsi from a can in the shower (Pepsi: the official drink of shower murder victims!) and she spills it and the pepsi spirals down the drain like in PSYCHO. It’s pretty amusing to see what at least appears to be a completely earnest Hitchcock homage in THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, but obviously it would be better if she were drinking chocolate syrup. If you think that would strain credulity, you obviously drink a lot more Pepsi in the shower than I do.

As you can tell from the title, there’s not really a lot of doubt as who the perpetrator is; we know that it’s a heavily-built guy wearing overalls and a burlap sack over his head with goggles, who kills people with tree pruning tools. Coincidentally, there happens to be this guy around town who works as a tree pruner, and he’s a heavily-built fellow who wears overalls and a burlap sack over his head with goggles on the job, which would not be especially noteworthy except that due to a hideous disfigurement (a “terrible chainsaw accident” is mentioned) he wears the same get-up off the clock as well. And he arrived in town right about the same time as the murders started. Also, his name is Charlie, and the name of the movie, which I never miss an opportunity to restate, is THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE. So I’m thinking this is probably the guy. The night is when he kills people, but now that I think about it, he’s also around during the day, and he dresses exactly the same. During the day, though, he’s able to direct his violent, psychotic rage towards plantlife, so I guess the title works.

Charlie’s not exactly an instant icon as a killer, but his vigorous approach (he likes to remove his victims’ heads as souvenirs) and distinctive headgear ensure he has what it takes to get the job done. But even the most iconic killer is nothing without some victims, so THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE brings us Jenny Parker (Aimee Tenaglia [here spelled “Aimie” for some reason] ASYLUM OF TERROR), a rebellious young teenager who just wants to party so goddam much that even the threat of a rampaging serial killer who just decapitated one of her friends not two minutes after they parted company can keep her from immediately scheduling a slumber party. This comes as something of an unhappy turn of events for her straight-laced sister (Monica Simmons, [no other credits] putting in some commendable effort at keeping the “spoilsport goody-two-shoes” sister grounded enough to be tolerable) and her dad (Joe Fishback, the as-near-as-I-can-tell-never-released-on-video LANI-LOA) who happens to be the town coroner. Jenny, who, in point of fact, does not seem very much to want to remain alive, will ultimately walk alone to an abandoned barn in the dead of night with a serial killer on the loose, and it will be up to her sister to save her.

That’s the skeleton of our story, but mostly THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE is content to just fuck around and introduce a string of colorful random characters for Charlie to kill off, which suits me just fine. Charlie claims his first victim almost immediately, and his next by minute 15, so things are going pretty well. But Charlie’s enthusiasm for the job seems likely to prove his undoing, because he’s not exactly keeping a low profile, and cuts a pretty identifiable figure, even attracting the attention of history’s dumbest witness:

COP: “So you saw nothing else?”

WITNESS: (frustrated) “How many times do I have to say it…” (suddenly, he stops and looks thoughtful). “Wait a minute… I did see… someone was watching from behind a bush... I think he was wearing a mask…. His face was covered, and he was kinda creepy. Like evil, ya know?”

Yeah, you know what son, that seems like it might have been worth mentioning.

The acting in this is uniformly horrible, but I do sort of like Joe Fishback's schlubby, grouchy Mr. Parker. He's a very New York character actor, and makes for a funny fit with the sunny, chipper LA suburbs. 

Anyway, the cops are onto Charlie so quick that we as filmgoers immediately suspect something is up. And, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER that brings us to the one real twist here, which I am about to spoil. See, it seems like everything with Charlie is a little too cut and dry, and by minute 42, something unexpected has happened: the cops actually put two and two together and arrested Charlie. Jenny’s Dad, Mr. Parker, is hauled in to try and get a confession out of Charlie, who it turns out is an old war buddy who has returned to town on his invitation. When he comes out of the interrogation room, he hands the cops a long confession which Charlie has related to him. Well, that wraps everything up in a neat little package… [starts to walk away, then thoughtfully turns around] just one more thing:

Everyone knows Charlie can’t talk after his face got chainsawed off, you moron!

Yes, it seems that it is, in fact, harmless old Mr. Parker who has been dressing like Charlie and offing local teens, and he invited his old comrade to come back to town as a cover, with the intent of framing him. For a psycho serial killer who constructed an elaborate plan to frame his disabled fellow brother-in-arms, he turns out to be a real nice guy about it, confessing to everything and explaining that he’s just glad the madness is over. He doesn’t even get mad when the police investigator (Kerry Knight, KING’S RANSOM) starts to smugly explain how he figured out the ruse as though it took the world’s greatest detective to find the hole in the claim that a mute guy confessed to the whole thing (or maybe he’s just embarrassed that he fucked this plan up so badly in the most obvious way possible right at the last minute).

Anyway, once Mr. Parker’s got this big secret off his chest, everybody’s real friendly about it, they don’t even handcuff him or make him take off his Charlie disguise, they just have him sit in the police station waiting room while they file the necessary paperwork. But something’s not adding up here, because the movie’s still got 25 minutes to go. So as the manipulative serial murderer and the detective who could hardly fail to catch him sit chatting amiably at the police desk, Parker offhandedly mentions that he’s just glad Charlie is off the streets. The cop chides him mildly for pointing the finger at an innocent man who just happens to look and act exactly like a serial killer in every way. But what’s this? “Charlie, innocent?” Parker huffs, “hardly!” “I thought you knew the whole story! Don’t you understand? Charlie’s like me! Only worse!” Sure, I killed two people, but the real unstoppable killing machine is still out there!

The cop says nothing and looks down shamefacedly. Oh, what’s that you glorified traffic cop, you just let the guy who was obviously a serial killer walk free, with a sincere apology for wasting his time? Not feeling so much like Columbo now, are we?

Correctly realizing that the cops in this town couldn’t find a serial killer if he literally wore a mask and goggles around every day in broad daylight, Parker escapes custody (basically just by standing up and walking back outside, so now this police department has just lost two serial killers in one night. Hopefully sheriff isn’t an elected position in this town!) and hunts down Charlie at his secret barn hideout for a final showdown. It's weird that this Machiavellian serial killer gets to be the hero at the end, but since Fishback is far and away the most entertaining actor in the movie, I'm OK with it. Oh, and he’s also still dressed as Charlie, so it’s pretty funny when the two Charlies finally have to duke it out. 

END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER

Anyway, that’s the single, solitary unexpected thing that happens in the entirety of THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE, but that’s OK. I like that one little spot of weirdness for flavor, and I like that the rest of it is just one Charlie or another butchering random people with various garden tools. It particularly rises to the occasion for the climax, when a gang of never-before-seen bikers make the mistake of following Charlie back to his hideout (yes, I believe the filmmakers here might have seen FRIDAY THE 13th PART III), and he finally has cause to bring out that chainsaw you already assumed he had stashed somewhere. His lair is a barn, but for some reason the inside is bathed in eerie red light. I don’t know why that would be (maybe he’s developing film in there?) but it’s the movie’s only attempt at atmosphere, and it gives the finale a little extra punch. Charlie’s all about the little bit of extra punch. I’m not going to sit here and claim that THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE is good, or scary, or even baseline competent; in many ways, it’s uglier and cheaper and the acting is worse than the already pretty bottom-of-the-barrel BLOOD FRENZY. But it’s definitely trying harder to entertain, and that counts for a lot around these parts.

Also I think it’s commendable that they have a character named Charlie who went crazy in Vietnam and is usually found up on ladders trimming trees, and they never make a “Charlie’s in the trees!” joke. I mean, it’s not something I’d be able to resist.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, oddly.
TITLE ACCURACY	Oh, 100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None yet, but Charlie absolutely deserves a couple of hacky DTV sequels or even a gritty reimagining by Rob Zombie.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Absolutely not.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Just in the usual slasher sense.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, Charlie watches a woman shower and we get his POV. Oddly, I’m not 100% sure he actually kills her.
MORAL OF THE STORY	This town needs