Horror Movie Review: The Night Before Easter (2014)

Written and directed by the pair of Joseph Henson and Nathan Johnson, The Night Before Easter is a super-low budget slasher horror.

It’s an admirable attempt at creating an Easter horror but is sorely lacking in many departments. Low budget or not, we’ve seen directors churn out gold with even less.

The story surrounds a local lunatic that escaped from a mental hospital and killed two teenagers. Years later, he somehow escapes again and goes to a storage facility where a group of teenage somethings are partying. It’s the night before Easter and the axe wielding lunatic is celebrating by committing his crimes wearing an Easter Bunny suit.

Cue a whole lot of talking…I mean an incredible amount of talking with the occasional kill thrown in to try and ensure the audience is awake and engaged.

The Night Before Easter is only 65 minutes long yet it still somehow drags and drags. Having sat through the entire thing, it’s clear that this idea would have been better served as a short lasting about 10 minutes long. It would have meant cutting the huge swathes of characters talking over each other which would have been no bad thing.

The victims of our Bunny-costumed killer do get a bit more development then most thanks to how little action there is. However, it’s all padding at best. A better set of actors might have been able to do something with this but the cast here are pretty poor. It has some of the most forgettable performances seen in an Easter horror yet.

It’s a boring movie and I can’t see many people getting through the first half awake. If that wasn’t bad enough, it has some poor production values with some really obvious sound issues. It just caps off a pretty miserable experience. Credit can be given for the attempt but when the end result is this, we’d all be better off without its existence.