NIGHT FRIGHT is not really an accurate title. There is very little night. Instead, the cameraman and director chose to shoot "day for night" which involves filming in broad daylight using tinted lenses on the camera to make it look like night. Shooting in black and white, this can be an effective technique. In color, though, it makes colors look dim and faded. Worse yet, there is no continuity; scenes go from day to night and back again with no rhyme or reason. This might work if some of the scenes took place in Los Angeles and others were set in Eastern Europe. But the geographic area involved is a tiny town near Dallas. And there is not a single fright anywhere to be seen.The plot has been done before and since. A experimental rocket is launched into space, then comes crashing back to Earth. One of the lab animals aboard survives the crash and mutates into a terrible beast that terrorizes the countryside.To be more accurate, it terrorizes a small group of incredibly bad mannered college students, who richly deserve what happens to them, and along the way kills off a few character actors.The town Sheriff tries to restore order. He's played by John Agar, whose brief marriage to Shirley Temple overshadowed his screen work. He's courting a pretty nurse who works at the local hospital. Neither his nor her character is developed enough to involve the viewer.Much has been made of the "bad" acting in the film, and I feel compelled to defend the efforts of the cast. Having lived in Texas all of my life I'm used to the various dialects to be found in the state. Some people in North Texas have a flat pattern to their speech with very little inflection. Besides which, nobody here gets what one would call great dialog.Agar does what he can with the material at hand. He says his lines clearly and stands at the right place at the right time. His career was an interesting one. He had many supporting roles in major studio productions, often in westerns starring John Wayne. IMDB shows him with ninety-six film and tv credits over a fifty-six year career. Had drinking (and arrests for drunk driving) not interfered, he could have had a major career. He figured out that if he were willing to work with Poverty Row studios he could get top billing, and would get paid for a project that would probably have a short shooting schedule.At the end of the day, acting is a job. It's great to be directed by Allan Dwan in SANDS OF IWO JIMA, which received four Academy Award nomination. But a project like NIGHT FRIGHT, directed by James A. Sullivan, got him top billing and a paycheck and a job is a job. A carpenter would rather work on a mansion in Malibu than on a new convenience store on the freeway access road. But, a working man's got to eat and has to feed his family.There are a couple of surprisingly good supporting actors. Bill Thurman, who would go on to play character parts in movies like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, plays Deputy Ben Whitfield, the Sheriff's right hand man who unfortunately forgets that he is carrying a gun at a critical point in the story.But the real scene stealing comes from Roger Ready as Professor Alan Clayton. To start with, he appears to be a truly gifted actor: without much screen time he establishes himself as just a nice, regular guy. He seems perfectly at ease on screen. To establish the Professor's credentials as an intellectual, the director uses one of the oldest cliches in the history of drama: in a couple of scenes, we see him smoking a pipe. This lets Ready draw attention from the main actors in the scene because he is always poking, prodding, scraping, lighting or relighting his pipe. His hands are never still. And if he is speaking and makes a gesture, it is always in his downstage hand and he can use the stem as a pointer. These scenes aren't worth stealing, but it's the thought that counts.It's a shame that the movie looks and sounds so dreary. It just looks cheaped out, with the North Texas locations providing no sense of place. There are too many scenes of trees, sometimes with wind blowing them, in a failed attempt to create suspense.The monster's costume isn't really all that bad. But when we see it in broad daylight, which a lens filter attempts to convince us is moonlight, it just isn't all that good either.

It had a budget of $18,000. That in itself gives you an idea of what to expect. The male teens look like they are in their 30's. The acting is so wooden the trees seem more animated. The lighting is terrible. I'm surprised people didn't sue it for eye strain. The only redeeming scene was seeing the Coca Cola machine in the restaurant. That's probably what cost the most in this film as I'm sure Coke didn't want their name associated with this turkey. It's so bad it's not even bad good. I wish I could get back the 85 minutes of my life that I wasted watching this crap.

John Agar is always fun to watch, here he has the only really strong role in the movie. A weak script, lots of hokey dialog, and some characters seem so weak they are really almost ONE dimensional. So why rate this as a 5?Simple, this is a fun movie that makes no pretense at serious cinema. There are some really pretty young ladies, and the 60s hairstyles are really fun to look at. There are also some really cool cars in the movie- 1966 Olds Toronado, '67 Pontiac Firebird convertible, '65 Chevy convertible, '67 Ford Galaxie convertible,and a first generation Riviera briefly seen. Don't expect too much, and just relax and have some fun. Don't think too much, but the monster really looked pretty decent, especially considering the whole budget was listed as $18,000 !!!

I am a fan of bad horror films of the 1950s and 60s--films so ridiculous and silly that they are good for a laugh. So, because of this it's natural that I'd choose this film--especially because with John Agar in it, it was practically guaranteed to be bad. Sadly, while it was a bad film, it was the worst type of bad film--dull beyond belief and unfunny. At least with stupid and over-the-top bad films, you can laugh at the atrocious monsters and terrible direction and acting. Here, you never really see that much of the monster (mostly due to the darkness of the print) and the acting, while bad, is more low energy bad...listless and dull.The film begins with some young adults going to Satan's Hollow to neck. Well, considering the name of the place, it's not surprising when they are later found chewed to pieces! Duh...don't go necking at Satan's Hollow!! Well, there are reports of some sort of crashing object from the sky, so what do the teens go? Yep, throw a dance party--a very, very, very slow dance party where the kids almost dance in slow motion. So it's up to the Sheriff (Agar) and his men to ensure that the teens can dance in peace without fear of mastication.As for the monster, it's some guy in a gorilla suit with a silly mask--a bit like the monster in ROBOT MONSTER. Not exactly original and not exactly high tech. To make it worse, it makes snorting noises and moves very, very slowly--so slow that even the most corpulent teen could easily outrun it! How it manages to kill repeatedly is beyond me.Overall, too dull to like--even if you are a fan of lousy cinema.