Rent 10 to Midnight (1983)

Past His Bedtime - 10 to Midnight review by griggs

My dad’s favourite genre was Westerns. But he was also a Charles Bronson completist. Whenever he rented a film, you could be sure Bronson would be the star. I was obviously sent to bed as he hit play. So 10 to Midnight carries a certain inherited weight — and a bit of forbidden-fruit curiosity.

Bronson is Bronson: granite-faced, morally impatient, utterly watchable. As Detective Kessler, hunting a serial killer by deeply dubious means, he’s in full Cannon mode — cheap, grubby, and entirely unbothered by plausibility. Still the last cowboy standing, just on a Los Angeles street instead of the Wild West. Kelly Preston, billed here as Kelly Palzis, is the best thing in it. Early in her career, she gets the comic lines and the emotional gut-punches, and handles both with a lightness the film could use more of.

The disappointment is J. Lee Thompson. The man who gave us Cape Fear, The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, and the shamefully neglected Yield to the Night directs adequately here, but co-writes clumsily. The story lurches where it should stalk, and the slasher mechanics sit awkwardly alongside the cop procedural. The film keeps tripping over its own ambitions — too sleazy for a thriller, too clumsy for exploitation. It wants to be grimy and righteous simultaneously, and ends up neither. The credits tick down to something that should detonate, but doesn’t quite.

Worth seeing for completists and Bronson devotees. Just don’t expect it to strike midnight.