cult film freak: CHARLES BRONSON CANNON CONTINUES WITH '10 TO MIDNIGHT'

Title: 10 to Midnight Year: 1983 Rates: ***1/2

Charles Bronson's Cannon Films were a total nightmare for those politically-correct critics who graded on their own flat curves, and 10 TO MIDNIGHT is surely no different... In fact it's probably the most hated of all...

That being a pure exploitation-driven nightmarish body count horror (during the Slasher genre craze) masquerading as a cop thriller about a young, mostly naked serial killer who, a hybrid of Ted Bundy and Richard Speck, kills sexy young girls and eventually sexy young nurses...

Making Bronson's Detective Leo Kessler, fitfully morphed from a cop to some kind of DEATH WISH style lawman-vigilante, not only do his usual trope-laden questioning of the liberal court system ("giving more rights to the criminals than their victims") but taking matters into his own hands in order to, you guessed it, "save the taxpayers money."

And as they say/so the cliche saying/excuse goes... that cops can't be everywhere at once...

But that's not true for the second half of 10 TO MIDNIGHT, infamously bearing a title that supposedly has nothing to do with the plot: Then again, while there's never an actual clock beginning at 11:50 pm and striking at 12 sharp, Bronson winds up in a short-spanned race-against-time urgency (midnight representing time running out) since his daughter, played by super-cute near-future BEVERLY HILLS COP starlet Lisa Eilbacher, is one of several nurses... including the late gorgeous Kelly Preston... who Brad Davis's younger brother Gene eventually sets his lusts on...

The late Kelly Preston in 10 to Midnight

The best scenes occur before the cops... with by-the-book rookie played by Bronson's DEATH HUNT co-star Andrew Stevens... moving in...

And in that it's purely Gene Davis's trashy ride as he goes from one doomed beauty to the next in an ultra-violent, anything-goes fashion (one scene taking place in the woods like a slasher flick) far more suited to the lower-budgeted 1970's exploitation drive-in circuit.

And given Cannon Films miraculous achievement of making their own low budget features look as crisp and glossy as almost any mainstream programmer, the stalking and slaying of nude, doomed, screaming starlets feels that much more crass, crude, dated and inappropriate. Or you can call it daring. Either way, 10 TO MIDNIGHT, with a tables-turned last act involving Bronson stalking the stalker in a DEATH WISH fashion, has always been a cult favorite among the hit-or-miss lot of Bronson/Cannon features despite Roger Ebert giving it zero stars i.e. an amputated thumb's down.