10 to Midnight (1983)

Charles Bronson is "a hero all the way" (Variety) as a rogue cop pursuing a deranged killer in this action-packed suspense thriller. Serving up vigilante justice as only he can, Bronson delivers one of his most riveting performances in this "exceedingly well-made" (Gene Siskel) film. Bronson plays Leo Kessler, a cynical Los Angeles cop on the trail of Warren Stacey (Gene Davis), a homicidal maniac who turns rejection from beautiful women into the ultimate revenge. When the legal system sets Stacey free, Kessler plants evidence to put him behind bars for good. But Kessler's plan backfires, leaving him with only one option: to hunt down Stacey on his own…before the crazed killer strikes again!

Bronson Tracks Nude Slasher=Great Movie

Ten to Midnight is one of those movies I pop in the dvd player at least once every 3 months.
I love revenge movies and I love Bronson, and Andrew Stevens who plays his sidekick .The fact that the killer "Gene Davis" is a hot looking guy that kills women totally in the nude isn't a bad angle either.
You could call it a slasher because the killer does slash his victims and there are some good kill scenes, but it's basically a psychological thriller..
The story is good and the action is nonstop.Bronson is on top of his game in this movie especially since the character that plays his daughter"Lisa Eilbacher" lives in the student nurse dorm that is being terrorized by the killer. It also has a good kill scene with "Ola Ray" the girl from the Michael Jackson Thriller Video.
If I were you I would buy it for your collection.
May 26, 2008

10 to Midnight, a Bronson Winner

This is one of my favorite Charles Bronson movies. If you enjoy classic police movies like "Dirty Harry" then be sure to at least rent this one. It is well worth owning since Bronson does a fine job along with the rest the cast in pulling off their roles. Bronson plays a police detective looking for a serila killer that is abducting young women and then stabbing them to death. His partner and him feel they know who the murderer is but they can't prove it. Bronson finally resorts to other tactics to get him behind bars, but it lands him in trouble. Being a resourceful man he finds a way to still get his man. Very entertaining movie in this Cop movie genre. I recommend it. Good quality DVD with good replayability. March 31, 2008

Classic Bronson

If you are a vigilante justice fan, this will fit your bill. Classic Bronson with great one-liners in the dialog. Glad to have in the collection between Bonson's "Deathwish" and Steven Segal's "Above the Law". April 15, 2007

One of the best

Simply one of the best "good guy gives bad guy what he has coming to him" movies out there
This is the one Bronson film that almost equals Clint Eastwood's DIRTY HARRY character.

My wife LOVES the finale.

Too bad our real legal system and current view of crooks is not like this film.

One of our classics in the DVD collection !!! September 12, 2005

Not fascist, just fed up!

It's been said more than once that pop culture is simply a mirror of the society that creates it. If that's the case, the glut of "street justice" movies that appeared during the 70s and 80s can only point to an American public fed up to the eyeballs with an epidemic of street violence and a broken-down, back-logged criminal justice system which was incapable of either protecting the citizenry or punishing the criminals. Probably the most famous of the "street justice" flicks is Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry," but the actor who, round for round, shot the largest number of psychopaths, hopheads, drug dealers, rapists, muggers, gangsters, and all-purpose scum was Charles Bronson. By the time the "Death Wish" series alone was finished, there probably wasn't a single professional baddie in Central Casting who hadn't been bludgeoned, immolated or gunned down by Chuckie B. Good for him!

"Ten to Midnight" is not exactly that sort of flick, but the spirit is there. Bronson plays Leo Kesseler, a burnt-out LA detective whose faith in "the system" (as it is always referred to in this type of movie) has long since gone the way of mood rings, encounter groups, and all the other I'm OK - You're OK, now-let's-get-in-the-hot-tub-and-groove touchy-feely affectations of the early 1970s. What Kesseler has instead is the bleak reality of the early 1980s, when the big cities of our fair land all had extensive areas resembling downtown Stalingrad circa December 1942, and nearly as much shooting, and a good cop could hardly shoot a fleeing criminal between the shoulder blades without getting himself in hot water. Such is the legacy of all those "you're not evil, you're misunderstood" social experiments in the wake of the 60s.

One guy who really is evil, and not misunderstood, is Warren Stacy (Gene Davis), a smarmy, creepy narccisist and sociopath who despite his ripped pysique and boy next door good looks cannot get a woman due to his horrible personality. His release comes in a disgusting parody of the sexual act, when he strips naked and then uses a knife to obtain satisfaction with the ladies. Stacy, however, is no ordinary nut case but an extremely clever and calculating killer, who is careful have an iron-clad alibi during all his crimes. Nevertheless, his smug arrogance and general air of evil convince Kessler that he's behind the string of vicious murders. In the movie's most memorable (non-violent) scene, Kessler and his straight-arrow partner pigeonhole Stacy in a police interrogation room, confront him with some sex toys found in his apartment, and provoke him into a truly frightening display of rage, in which he is literally drooling and smashing things. Gene Davis deserves kudos for truly creeping me out during this scene: when Bronson cracks his icy veneer of superiority, out gushes the torrent of slime and pus in his brain. It's a horrible and compelling moment.

When Kessler realizes he has no hard evidence against Stacy, he plants some to ensure the sleazoid will never stab again. Like the torture scene in "Dirty Harry," however, it backfires; Kessler's evidence-tampering is found out and Stacey walks. Now begins the "cat-and-mouse" game between the suspended Kessler and the vengeful Stacy. Again, there are similarities to "DH," in which both men taunt and stalk each other, with Kessler getting the upper hand as the film goes on. Unfortunately for Bronson's Kessler, his plan to torment Stacy (not a very good plan considering his personality) backfires a second time when the killer realizes that Kessler has a sexy daughter of just the age Stacy likes to "date."

The end of the film, which I first saw on TV when I was a kid, scared the hell out of me. Without spoiling it, I will say that when a naked,knife-wielding, sexually twisted psychpath is unleashed in a nurses' dormitory in the middle of the night, only truly bad and disgusting things can ensue. Some people think of this as a rather generic potboiler, but it is unusual in the way it jumps around from detective story to slasher film, thriller to "street justice" fantasy. The negative chemistry between Bronson and Davis is also quite entertaining.

"Ten to Midnight" is not, however, a fascist or right-wing film. Neither, for that matter, are the "Death Wish" flicks. They simply reflected the mood of the period, in which most people were fed up with rampant crime and violence in our big cities and had lost faith in the police to do anything about it. Kessler's disgust with the impotence of his own system doesn't make him a Nazi; it simply reflects the frustration of somebody who became a cop to protect people from criminals and finds himself powerless to do his job. And as "Death Wish's" Paul Kersey would be the first to tell you, in a land where there is no justice, a man is compelled to make his own. August 21, 2005

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