Late one night recently I was browsing streaming services for a movie to watch, and I found a section of Paramount+ called “Action-Packed Summer.” It was all big budget, well known studio movies like GLADIATOR, BRAVEHEART, all the DIE HARDs, the CHARLIE’S ANGELSes, T2, STAR TREK, and weirdly ZERO DARK THIRTY… and then one and only one small-timer indie movie most people never heard of: FEAR THE NIGHT (2023). I had actually been meaning to see it because it stars Maggie Q (NAKED WEAPON, DRAGON SQUAD, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III, LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD, PRIEST), so I took this as my reminder. Thank you, Paramount corporation, for looking out for us Maggie QAnons.

It’s a really strange fit for that category because it’s a low rent home invasion thriller from Quiver Distribution, who literally produced a bunch of their movies with Redbox. The only ones I’ve seen by them are BECKY and WRATH OF BECKY, but they also did MONEY PLANE, DEAD FOR A DOLLAR, LIGHTS OUT and OUTLAW POSSE. One of their upcoming movies (FIRST SHIFT) is directed by Uwe Bolle, and one of their most recent (AGENT RECON) is a sci-fi action movie with dual-wielding, tactical gear Chuck Norris as the central figure on the cover. (Norris is two years older than Joe Biden.)

Point being, don’t expect slickness or production value from FEAR THE NIGHT. It will not have those things. What it does have, besides Q, is an appealingly straight forward premise: troubled Iraq war veteran Tess (Q) is having a bad time at her sister’s bachelorette party in a remote cabin, kinda wishing she never came, but it’s a good thing she did because they get attacked by vicious dudes who think there’s money in the attic and she’s the only one who knows how to fight back.

Before all that, on their way to the cabin, they stop at a mini-mart, where some rednecks hit on them. Tess tells them off, and later when they’re being terrorized she realizes it’s some of the same guys. This seemed extremely familiar to me, and eventually I realized it was because a very similar thing happened in a movie I saw on Tubi called THE RETREAT (2021). Both films have tough lesbians, lots of squabbling, and bigots attacking a cabin during a pre-wedding activity (“wedding planning party” in that one). I don’t believe FEAR THE NIGHT is copying THE RETREAT, or is made by people who know it exists, but this is evidence that it’s not a fresh or imaginative take on this type of thriller.

The thing that really works is Q, with the type of dedicated performance and physical presence we’ve come to expect from her. But it’s funny how much of a jerk Tess is from the beginning, always fighting with her uptight sister Beth (Kat Foster, Jean-Claude Van Johnson), and never hiding how much she dislikes Beth’s friends. Fortunately some of her smart ass comments are pretty funny, and her bitch powers do come in handy in the mini-mart scene, where she gets in a military-background-off with the sexual harassers and then casually keys their truck on the way out.

The bickering between sisters is unpleasant, but I do like the contrast between broody, six-months-sober Tess and the wine-loving traditional girly-girls she’s stuck with. I think feeling like the odd person out at an event like this is a relatable situation, and here it’s illustrated through action hero tropes. (I don’t think it’s noted that she’s a lesbian until later, so it doesn’t even get into her feelings about drinking through penis-shaped straws.)

I like the tension between us knowing Tess is right and that it’s reasonable for her sister to get mad at her for sneaking into the neighboring house to spy on people she thinks are suspicious, but I like it better when the arguing stops. She does get along with the sister who’s getting married, Rose (Highdee Kuan, The Brothers Sun), and anyway the squabbles lead to apologies and having each other’s backs. When the shit goes down (with a ruthless body count, by the way) Tess goes into superior officer mode, making plans, giving orders, pumping people up. Don’t get your hopes up for it to shift into a full-on action movie, though. It has a little bit of fighting, mostly some stabbing, lots of people being shot through with arrows. (Stunt coordinator: Justin Gant, who doubled Thomas Lennon in WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY.) It’s a pretty fun pay off, though the villain’s plot and the miscommunication between the two sides are too half-baked to be fully satisfying.

FEAR THE NIGHT had me thinking about 2020s Michael Jai White movies like THE HARD WAY, TAKE BACK and AS GOOD AS DEAD. I liked all of those better than this, but it gives me the same combination of sadness that this type of star vehicle can’t get the production values of even the direct-to-Blockbuster-Video days, and appreciation that their badassness is still fun to watch in less-than-ideal circumstances. Luckily Q got to have a real deal, wide release action showcase as recently as 2021, with Martin Campbell’s THE PROTÉGÉ. FEAR THE NIGHT is the later Maggie Q movie you resort to only if you’ve already seen that and have run out of options.

Saying this doesn’t feel like a real movie might be too harsh, but it feels like VOD through and through, and not in a good way. It has all the style and grit of a Hallmark Channel movie, with that shiny digital look, a painfully generic score, no other music (you’d think someone would play music at some point during a road trip and cabin getaway with the girls) and copy-paste redneck villains I couldn’t have picked out in a line up one minute after the movie ended. The acting is always competent, but only Q consistently makes her dialogue seem natural. When I looked up the director about two-thirds of the way through I was expecting somebody who’d done similar indies or made-for-cable movies I’d never heard of, but holy shit— that’s right. That was the other reason I wanted to see this besides Maggie Q. Somehow this is written and directed by Neil LaBute?

I’m no expert on the topic. Never seen any of his plays. When he became a filmmaker there was much hype about an edgy new cinematic voice, and a similar amount of controversy about whether this voice was being used to criticize misogyny or practice it. I thought the answer was very obviously the former, but I haven’t seen IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS or NURSE BETTY since they came out in 1997, 1998 and 2000, so I don’t know what my opinion would be of them now. When I reviewed THE WICKER MAN (2006) I did not argue that it was a good movie, but I gave it more credit than most, arguing that “there are some signs that it might just be a big joke on gender relations.” Here we have a movie where you’d really have to be thick not to know the movie is on the side of the women, even though there are a couple scenes where very degrading things are said by the male villains (who are there for money, but are also murderers and rapists).

I hadn’t seen a LaBute movie since 2008’s LAKEVIEW TERRACE (which I remember being a surprisingly effective, uncomfortable studio thriller), so I lost track of him. Since then he did the remake of DEATH AT A FUNERAL (2010) and several I had not heard of. Making a low budget genre movie with a badass action star is, to me, not slumming, it’s actually something to aspire to, but filmatistically this is really shoddy for a guy with that history. It was his third film released within a year, and I’m sorry to say it seems more like throwing out a quickie for the paycheck than having some fun doing something different.

That said, Q spoke highly of him and his collaboration in promotional interviews (she had him rewrite it so they have to find household objects to use as weapons, instead of just finding guns), and while I hope she gets some higher quality showcases soon I’m glad I got to see her grimace and stab some motherfuckers, as part of this action-packed summer.