Fear the Night 
                                      
Director: Neil LaBute
Year: 2023
Rating: 5.0
These are the sorts of films I generally avoid like a plate of oysters. A group of women trapped in an isolated home with a pack of feral men picking them off one by one. There is too much inherent misogyny at play. In the end the men usually get their just deserts, but in the meantime, women get killed in horrible ways. Incel members probably leave before the final act. But this one has Maggie Q and Neil LaBute as the director. LaBute is a very respected director and Maggie Q is Maggie Q. I have been a fan since her Hong Kong films going back to 2001 in the dreadful Model from Hell. After that Gen-Y-Cops and The Naked Weapon made up for that.



LaBute who also wrote the script tries hard to create individual characters for the women before they are killed but in truth nearly all of them are irritating. Except the two who are killed off quickly. Even Maggie who is the heroine of the film has the charm of a prickly cactus. None of the dialogue between the women when trapped in the house feels real or clever - not that I would know what that would be. But it feels generic and quickly written. I didn't feel much when the women start getting killed - shocked at the sudden violence but that is the point of these types of films. It is a game of who gets killed next.



Eight women decide to throw a bachelorette party out in the desert in the home where Maggie and her sister used to live as children. So far out in the desert that their phones get no signal. Then out of nowhere, one of them gets an arrow in her heart. The house is surrounded by a group of men who want to terrorize them. They do. Except Maggie who is an ex-soldier who was in Fallujah. She secures the home and begins to plan how to kill them. It is all rather stupid really. What Home Invaders would signal they were there by killing one of them and then sitting back. Haven't they gone to Home Invaders school. You just go knock on the door and go in all at once. I admit that once the men start getting killed brutally, there is a degree of satisfaction. Most unbelievable of course is that eight women would voluntarily be out of cell phone range for a weekend.  That will teach them.