RED MIDNIGHT (1966) **

A man has an accident while waterskiing.  A doctor on a passing boat tries to be a Good Samaritan and helps him, little realizing he’s a foreign agent plotting to detonate a nuke on American soil.  The man’s co-conspirators kidnap the doctor who convinces them a coordinated attack on the country’s fire departments, combined with mass arson would be a wiser strategy in the long run.  Really, he’s trying to string them along so he can find the nuke and disarm it. 

Red Midnight contains its share of moments.  I enjoyed the opening credits sequence where the titles appear as newspaper headlines that are slowly burned away, kind of like on Bonanza.  There’s also an icky part where the doctor is forced to perform an impromptu cancer surgery on his captor. 

The plan itself is pretty interesting.  Too bad you are forced to sit through long scenes of people explaining it all again and again.  After all that, once the “Red Midnight” attack finally occurs, it’s underwhelming.  It also suffers from too much stock footage of firefighters, out of focus shots, and scenes of random indeterminable objects in flames that are supposed to represent (I guess) burning buildings. (The sequence detailing the inevitable fallout runs way too long too.)  Then again, what do you expect from a low budget flick dealing with such large-scale destruction? 

You also have to deal with lots of dull narration, amateurish acting, awful ADR, and choppy editing (including several jump cuts).  The film is packed with padding too, although some of the filler is kind of fun.  I’m thinking specifically of the perplexing side jaunt to a night club where characters inexplicably hop on stage and break out into song and dance numbers.  I mean, performing cheeseball music acts in a chintzy night club isn’t the kind of behavior you want to engage in while you’re secretly plotting terrorism on a massive scale.  (Granted, it’s against your will but still.)  The scenes of sexy go-go dancers shaking their moneymakers helps somewhat too.  These moments don’t save the movie, but they do prevent Red Midnight from being a total bomb.