Title: STAG NIGHT
Directed by: Peter A. Dowling
Starring: Kip Pardue, Vinessa Shaw and Breckin Meyer
The tagline to this film is: No matter what happens, stay on the train. The final lesson learned too late by all. The film starts off really quick. We don’t get to know a lot about our characters except that Mike (Kip Pardue) is the one getting married, his brother Tony (Breckin Meyer) is a notorious troublemaker, Joe (Carl Geary) is a family man (which spells death in any horror film) and Carl (Scott Adkins) is the slick ladies man.
Because Tony is such a badass, they get thrown out of a stripclub, where Carl claims to know of another one uptown. They run to the nearest subway station to catch a ride where they run into two strippers from the same place they left. Tony proceeds to make unwanted advances toward Brita (Vinessa Shaw), stripper and Columbia history major. She maces Tony and inadvertently everyone else in the subway car. She then forces opens the subway door as it is stopped for a passing train (why she couldn’t have walked to another car I cannot fathom, only that Dowling wanted the woman to be an impulsive drama queen), they all get off, the subway leaves even after the conductor saw that the doors were open – turning off the indicator buzzer. The adventure begins at a locked and abandoned-since-Watergate subway stop. The top billing trio along with Joe goes off to find a way out, while stripper Michelle (Sarah Barrand) and Carl get cozy in a disgusting NYC subway station – yeah that’ll happen. They run into some “Subway Rats” (as listed on IMDB) who appear as if they’re all competing for the Captain Jack Sparrow lookalike contest, wielding machetes and various homemade weaponry.
What happens next you can only imagine. They get picked off one by one in the same almost predictable gory fashion. However, some of the deaths were a tad clever; one involved the subway track switchover and another that incorporates the infamous 3rd rail, which is always a delight. The acting by Meyer, Pardue & Shaw was adequate, but since there was no ample character development, it made it very hard to care who survived or didn’t. I wanted to know why these crazy homeless murderers were so crazy. Did they drink too much sewer water or maybe they ate a syphilis infected sandwich? I cannot accept that they were just “crazy.” Dowling’s end product seemed too rushed; as if he wanted to forego the foreplay of a back-story and get straight to the carnal blood-fest. In addition I felt this film was very anti-homeless; but it’s not like they can get offended by the film since they won’t be watching it anyway.
If you decide to take a chance on the film anyway, I recommend playing: Stag Night the Drinking Game. Take a shot every time someone says “Did you hear that?”
Gore factor: 4 out of 5
Story: 1 out of 5
Suspense: 3 out of 5
Acting: 3 out of 5
Overall Rating: 2 out of 5
Reviewed by: JM Willis
