Alone at Night is Erotic Exploitation Horror That Doesn’t Quite Connect [Review]

Alone at Night, written and directed by Jimmy Giannopoulos, and starring Ashley Benson, opens with G-Eazy and Winnie Harlow–in a confusing and hardly scary opening scene. G-Eazy is killed by the Crow-Bar Killer, who serves as the main antagonist in this movie. G-Eazy’s acting isn’t quite up to snuff yet, but his contribution as being in charge of the music for Alone at Night was a positive one… 

And that is where the positives come to a screeching halt…

Ashley Benson stars as Vicky. After breaking it off with her boyfriend, Vicky is looking to get off the map for a little while and does so by staying at her friend’s cabin in the middle of the woods. Vicky works as a cam girl for a website called 18 & Over, which is a stand in for OnlyFans. Alone at Night is an erotic horror movie after all… 

During her stay at this cabin, Vicky primarily performs for her 18 & Over customers, older men who lust over her as she performs softcore acts for them partially naked, but never fully undressed. Vicky also spends a good amount of time watching a reality television show called Trap Stars, which is hosted by Paris Hilton, who actually played herself, and scenes from Trap Stars are inexplicably spliced throughout the film. The audience gets a way too heavy dose of reality television… 

Pretty much immediately after Vicky arrives at the cabin, power outages start to become a consistent issue, and it is clear that she is being stalked by someone. And even though Vicky is aware of being stalked because of hearsay rumors told to her by the people she encounters, she still proceeds to allow multiple guys to get close to her. Examples include the pizza guy, the maintenance guy, the neighbor guy, and the alleged cousin of a friend. Vicky insinuates attraction towards each and every guy she encounters, even if she is skeptical of them, striking up varying levels of flirtatious relationships with each… 

Alone at Night takes place in a post pandemic world and is overly and annoyingly utilizing COVID as a punchline for jokes. The laughs in general in Alone at Night are few and far between, and it seems like the Trap Stars reality television show footage was shoehorned into this movie for the purpose of comic relief, like Randy in Scream, but instead of Jamie Kennedy, it’s the cast of a reality television show. And instead of providing exposition important to the plot, Trap Stars provides absolutely nothing but a few laughs. The character from Trap Stars, Dead Ass, made me chuckle on a few occasions, primarily just because of his funny name, and also because of his budding relationship with Lindsey Pelas, who plays herself, which is ridiculous but amusing. If the actual purpose of Trap Stars was to be a satirical portrayal of reality television, then I’m not sure what that was doing in this movie at all…

The gimmicky casting in Alone at Night was borderline obnoxious. I like all of the performers in this movie, but why is Pam Anderson playing the sheriff of a town in the middle of the woods? And why is A$AP Nast her deputy? This was taking stunt casting too far. I get the appeal of stunt casting. But I genuinely disliked the performances from pretty much every actor in this movie except for Ashley Benson, who was still somehow really great in Alone at Night, even if her character was dumb as rocks… 

Alone at Night has a lot of bad qualities, but the most grating is the stupidity of Vicky. The fact that she could not puzzle the mystery together until it was nearly too late was beyond ridiculous. Every single character she encountered said things that should have allowed her to figure out what was actually going on within two-seconds. It’s annoying when the audience can connect the dots so easily, but the star of the movie cannot. The characters are actually telling her everything she needed to know in order to solve the very simple mystery. Yet, she just could not figure it out…

While the Crow-Bar Killer is wreaking havoc on all the characters in the region surrounding Vicky’s cabin, the audience is suffocating in confusing decisions made by Vicky. Vicky is now having sex with strangers, smoking weed with strangers, but worst of all ignoring the most obvious of clues. The only sense of normalcy weirdly comes from one of her ‘18 & Over’ customers, played by Luis Guzman, who is always charming as a performer, and was a welcome presence in this movie. Guzman’s character seemed to actually care about Vicky as a friend. 

Overall, it is difficult to review a movie like this. Alone at Night has little to no interest in being a movie to take seriously. And how do you judge something that isn’t even trying to be taken seriously? All you can base judgement on is whether it has any entertainment value. Yes, it was a semi-enjoyable watch, but I would also say it is a total waste of ninety-minutes. I’m not even sure who the target demographic of this movie is. I’m glad Pam Anderson is still working, and it is always nice to see Paris Hilton doing stuff in movies, but I really would have loved to see this flick take itself a little more seriously. Erotic horror can be a lot of fun if done right, and the audience generally gives movies from this subgenre a lot of slack when it comes to characters and plot being logically grounded, but Alone at Night was trying to have way too much fun, to the point where it just became self-parody…

The finale of Alone at Night was confusing and frustrating. Without including specific spoilers, of course the good guys prevail, but the metatextual nature of the finale was a massive disappointment. I still don’t understand what Jimmy Giannopoulos was trying to get across with this story. The Trap Stars storyline and Vicky/Crow-Bar Killer/Cabin storylines have virtually no relation to one another… I thought that the premise of a cam girl being stalked was a decent enough place to start, and the mystery surrounding the cabin had the makings of a solid whodunnit, but I don’t understand why the Trap Stars bit was included. Maybe I’m just a simpleton and didn’t pick up on the meta ingenious and sharp satire of Alone at Night…

Alone at Night is available on VOD as of January 20, 2023.

Wicked Rating: 4/10

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