Review of Night Slaves

In case you're somewhat familiar with my user-comments' account, you might know that I have a strange fondness for made-for-TV horror/thriller movies from the early 1970s. Quite often they are genuinely well-scripted, tense, atmospheric and in desperate need for rediscovery. But I even tend to be generous and mild towards the ones that are obviously less qualitative, like this "Night Slaves", for example. The plot is implausible, the surprise twists are absurd and the characters are antipathetic, but nevertheless I enjoyed how director Ted Post ("Magnum Force", "Beneath the Planet of the Apes") and his talented cast (including James Franciscus, Andrew Prine and Leslie Nielsen) desperately attempt to uphold the mystery. Recovering from a terrible car accident that put a metal plate in his head, Clay Howard takes his estranged wife Marjorie on a road trip through rural California. They stop for a hotel in a sleepy little town, and you may the "sleepy" very literally, since practically every local is taking a nap in the middle of the day. When night falls, however, all residents - and Marjorie - are suddenly mass-hypnotized and led into trucks. What happens from there is quite reminiscent to the very first zombie movies ever made, as well as to certain alien-invasion Sci-Fi movies from the fifties! In all zombie movies made prior to "Night of the Living Dead" in 1969, like "White Zombie" and "Plague of the Zombies", the dead are solely brought back to life to work as slaves in mines or in plantations, and also in a few B-movie classics in the Sci-Fi genre (such as "It came from Outer Space", "Invaders from Mars") human beings are enslaved by superior extra-terrestrials. The denouement in "Night Slaves" is much simpler and sillier, but at least the premise felt like a nostalgic throwback. The film honestly doesn't deserve a rating higher than 5 out of 10, but I also happen to be a sucker for bleak and depressing endings, and the best and most shocking part about "Night Slaves" is definitely the climax.