Latex Movie Review: Heart of Midnight

There is little doubt that Heart of Midnight is your typical low budget independent movie where the director will cast any actor to any part provided they have some sort of name recognition. Director Matthew Chapman was lucky enough to sign actress Jennifer Jason Leigh as the lead and kept her in the cast despite her having a broken leg. Usually when your lead actress breaks her leg you would either recast or postpone production long enough for the cast to come off. Apparently Chapman did not have the budget for a delay in production nor wanted to recast a lesser known actress as the lead. So the broken leg was written into the script. Chapman also cast his wife, actress Denise Dumont, as a social worker who is assigned to Jennifer after she is raped. Dumont was pregnant at the time, and throughout the film you see her in various stages of pregnancy. The scenes were most likely shot out of sequence which explains why Dumont goes from slightly pregnant to extremely pregnant and back to slightly pregnant. Actor Peter Coyote, who had worked with Chapman in the past, is miscast as the romantic lead. Coyote was twenty years older than Jennifer at the time, and at age 47 it was not believable that a 25-year-old girl would fall for him.

Jennifer plays Carol Rivers, a mentally unstable girl who lives with her mother ( Brenda Vaccaro ) until one day she is visited by an attorney representing her recently deceased Uncle Fletcher who announces that she has inherited Fletcher's night club. It turns out that Fletcher was in the middle of having the club renovated when he dropped dead. Carol decides to move out of her house and live at the apartment above the nightclub while overseeing it's renovation. After she is raped by some of the workmen ( including Steve Buscemi in one of his early roles ) and the detective assigned to her case ( Frank Stallone ) begins to put the blame on her, Carol begins to hallucinate. A second detective named Sharpe ( Peter Coyote ) is assigned to Carol's case and almost immediately begins a relationship with her. But as the film progresses it begins to be clear that Carols hallucinations are probably real, and that Sharpe is not who he says he is. Aside from poor casting choices Chapman's script is poorly written and highly formulaic. But where he lacked in writing he exceeded in directing, nearly making up for the script's shortcomings with some truly creepy visuals. Strangely enough Chapman would abandon directing to become a scriptwriter. But what really saves the movie is Jennifer Jason Leigh's superb acting. In the end Heart of Midnight comes off as a reasonable if slightly predictable B movie thriller.

THE SCENE
At 1hr 25 Min into the movie Jennifer is investigating some mysterious noises and finds a secret room. She sees a black latex dress with a lace back and front hanging on a bondage post. She finds this so distracting that someone is able to come up behind her and knock her unconscious. She awakes and finds herself wearing the dress and chained to a post. This is the same dress she is wearing on the video box, the picture showing her from the back smoking a cigarette. This picture is probably the reason why you bought or rented this movie, so it is about time we finally see her wearing it. In the scene we finally meet the movie's villain, a deranged leather wearing lesbian named Sonny who was one of Uncle Fletcher's victims and now lives behind the walls of the club in secret passageways. Sonny forces her to watch a video of her perverted Uncle possibly murdering a woman tied to the same post. While Fletcher was alive Sonny was the one forced to be his videographer, which explains why she has set up a video camera to tape Jennifer. In the midst of this Sonny reveals to Jennifer that her uncle had molested her when she was very young, a memory that Jennifer had blocked out. Sonny then brings in a group of old "swingers" and tells them to take advantage of her. At first they ignore Jennifer's pleas and begin to molest her, the situation causing her to go into hysterical deafness. Jennifer turns her back to them and begins reciting the Lord's Prayer. The swingers begin to realize that she is not play acting and is not a willing participant and begin to unshackle her when Sonny chases them off with a sword. The deranged Sonny then attempts to stab Jennifer ( who is now so frightened she has gone into a trance ) but Sharpe steps in at the last second and chases Sonny off. He unlocks Jennifer and sends her away. The entire scene is dimly lit and there are no good angles of Jennifer from the front wearing the dress, just mostly closeups and a prolonged shot of her back to the camera as she walks away. You do see enough of her wearing the dress to get a good idea what the whole costume would look like, but a better view would have been nice. Once freed by Sharpe Jennifer puts a coat on over the dress. There are some moments where you see Jennifer walking down a dimly lit staircase and the coat slightly opens up revealing the dress beneath. The combination of the child abuse revelation, the snuff film, the attempt to get swingers to rape her and the cast on Jennifer's leg that makes her hobble when she walks along with no good long shots of her in the dress robs every ounce of sexiness from the scene. Still, there is enough here to freeze frame and get excited over the still pictures.