Midnight Intruders kicks off with a long scene of the Husband (Alain Mayniel) and the Wife (Francoise Darc) making love intercut randomly with footage of planes taking off and landing. It’s hard to tell if the shots of the planes are supposed to be important to the plot or symbolic of the couple’s lovemaking. Turns out it’s both. You see, after the achieving lift-off in the bedroom, the Husband catches a flight to go on a business trip.
While he’s away, the Wife has an affair with the Lover (Alexander Chapuies). Predictably, the Husband comes home early, catches them in the act, and bludgeons the dude to death. That’s just a taste of the terror the night has in store for the Wife.
Written and directed by Gary (Amanda by Night) Graver, Midnight Intruders suffers from some inconsistent sex scenes. While Graver manages to make a few look kinda arty (like the red-tinted three-way), others are either boring or laughable. Even then, some of the arty looking ones fall flat, like the cool looking sauna sequence that is undone by some awful fake Bob Dylan music on the soundtrack. Other odd scenes, like the extended foot massage and the part where the Wife and the Lover fuck fully clothed in the shower just plain don’t work.
The first half is basically a skin flick. (The Wife must do it like six times straight with the Lover. How can the Husband ever expect to compete with THAT?) Things switch over to horror at the halfway point with the Wife having to deal with not only her murderous husband, but also a pair of scummy thieves who literally drop in on her. After dabbling in home invasion horror, it then turns into a crime flick in the closing minutes, wrapping things up with a completely unsatisfying and abrupt ending.
Midnight Intruders is only an hour long, but despite the brief running time, there are long scenes that ramble on needlessly. (I’m thinking specifically of the shooting up scene accompanied by annoying distorted fuzztone guitar.) The awfully dubbed dialogue is sometimes good for a laugh, and the title sequence is kinda freaky too, so it’s not all bad.
AKA: The Wife.
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