I guess you'd say Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker, a.k.a. Night Warning - let's just call it Night Warning - is a character study/ slasher. Billy Lynch is just a baby when his parents die in a spectacular car accident that was later ripped off in the Final Destination films. So he's raised by his aunt (Susan Tyrrell, Academy Award nominee for Fat City), who's just a little too over-protective... to the point of homicidal psychosis. Tyrrell is fascinating to watch, and as the film builds to its demented climax, it's a blast. It's got a minimal, effective score. The closing credits mention a proper theme song called "Little Billy Boy" with lyrics and everything, but we don't seem to ever hear it in the movie.
Unfortunately, the film putzes around a lot in the middle. Bo Svenson's a police detective who's constantly barking up the wrong tree, including persecuting Billy's gay basketball coach. This whole subplot stumbles clumsily over the line between preachy after-school special and offensively politically incorrect and barely has any connection to the central story either way. You've got a pretty interesting supporting cast, though, including Julia Duffy from the Newhart show as the girlfriend and Bill Paxton in one of his earliest film roles as Billy's rival. Horror fans will also immediately recognize Britt Leach, Mr. Sims from Silent Night Deadly Night, as a police officer with more of a clue.
No Code Red release felt more conspicuously absent from this site than this one. Like Witchmaker, Night Warning had never been available on DVD until CR finally brought it home in 2013 (after having originally been announced back in 2007). At the time, it was a DVD-only release with CR swearing up and down it would never be re-issued on BD, but we all knew they'd break down eventually. And in 2017, they finally did, releasing it as a "Diabolik Exclusive Blu-Ray" (in quotes, because you could also get it from sites like Code Red's bigcartel and the Dark Forces Superstore 🤷).
2014 Code Red DVD top; 2017 Code Red BD bottom. |
2014 Code Red DVD top; 2017 Code Red BD bottom. |
Both discs just feature the original mono track with no subtitle options. It's bumped up to lossless DTS-HD on the blu, but it still has a core background hiss, with the occasional crack and pop. A little noise reduction would've gone a long way, but it's never loud enough to become bothersome.
Code Red's DVD is an impressively endowed special edition. But if you only see one DVD extra in your life, and I mean on any DVD ever, you've got to watch Susan Tyrrell's on-camera interview. She tells us right off the bat that she "hated every damn minute of it" and has "a lot of horrifying stories to tell." It looks like she started out recording an audio commentary, but they wound up with just this perfect, eleven minute piece where she goes from "I'd fuck anybody to get out of this picture... except Bo" to "brilliant! That's a great scene!"
And if you're disappointed to've missed out on a potential audio commentary, don't worry; we've got still got two. One by Billy himself, Jimmy McNichol, and one by co-writers Steven Breimer (who also produced) and Alan Jay Glueckman. We also get on-camera interviews with McNichol, Steve Eastman who played the coach, Breimer and effects artist Allan Apone, plus the original theatrical trailer. Thankfully, the blu-ray carries over absolutely everything from the DVD and also has reversible cover art with the Night Warning artwork.
I - as I'm sure many of you felt - was quite reluctant to double-dip on this title. After all, most of us who bought the DVD edition in 2014 only did so after being flat-out guaranteed repeatedly that a blu-ray was impossible. So seeing a replacement roll out after that felt a bit like being conned. But looking at the top notch work put into this title, I'd say the second price of admission is perfectly justified. So I don't regret having this blu in my collection for a second, even if that is just a phony drawing of a knife instead of the cosmic doorway I always imagined.
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