By Robert Scucci
| Published
Not all genre mashes are created equal, and 2014’s Naked After Midnight (or After Midnight in some markets) is the most baffling one I’ve come across so far. The film is about a stripper who gets murdered at her place of work, The Candy Cat Club, and her news-anchor sister putting on a wig and posing as an exotic dancer to avenge her death. Along the way, she’s manipulated by her producer and therapist, both of whom want to take their one-sided relationships with her to the next level. Unfortunately for them, she’s a little too preoccupied with her poorly planned revenge arc to entertain their romantic advances.
The whole thing plays out like a bad episode of Law & Order: SVU, but with the added melodrama and sexual exploitation of Showgirls. In better hands, Naked After Midnight could have made for a solid comedy or parody film, but it leans hard into mystery thriller territory, stripping the film of any semblance of charm. Still, it’s so laughably bad, for reasons I’m about to get into, that it’s worth a watch if you’re a masochist like me and just want to watch the world burn.
News Anchor By Night, Revenge Stripper By … Also Night?
Naked After Midnight follows Constance (Catherine Annette), who learns about the murder of her stripper sister, Ann (Jeneta St. Clair), while reading the teleprompter at her news network job. Broken by the news, her suspiciously supportive boss, John (Tim Abell), allows her to take some time off to grieve. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Hubbard (Richard Grieco), who is also suspiciously supportive of her (read: both men want her badly), gives her a shoulder to cry on.
Constance has a different plan in mind, though, and it involves avenging her sister’s death. To do this, Constance, who I feel the need to remind you is a public figure, throws on a blonde wig and asks Candy Cat Club owner Rikki (Tawny Kitaen) for a job despite the fact that she doesn’t know how to dance. The other girls at the club, like Misty (Tiffany Tynes), Britney (Cindy Lucas), and Zoey (Christine Nguyen), don’t take kindly to the prospect of a new stripper cutting into their tip pool. None of them seem all that broken up or concerned over the fact that Ann, somebody they worked closely with a day earlier, was murdered in the parking lot outside their place of work. While all of this is happening, Constance is haunted by apparitions of her dead sister, who just comes and goes as she pleases.
One of the club’s regulars, Julian (Bobby Rice), recognizes Constance from her news show and wants to help with the mystery. Constance is too busy talking to her hospitalized, brain-dead sister Sasha (Madison Ivy) about her revenge plot, though, despite the fact that she’s in a persistent vegetative state and has absolutely no clue what Constance is saying. As Constance digs herself deeper into the world of exotic dancing, she discovers truths she isn’t ready for, making her even more unhinged in her quest to find who killed her sister and return the favor.
Where Do I Start?
If Naked After Midnight had better acting, better production values, a better screenplay, and better direction, it could be a solid movie. If you were to scan that previous sentence with a sarcasm detector a la Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, the machine would detonate in your hands. Every line of dialogue between the strippers feels ripped straight from the Mean Girls playbook, but without any wit or naive teenage charm. Everybody is incredibly mean here except for Rikki, who looks after her girls and always packs heat in her clutch bag.
The weird love triangle between Constance and her two persistent male suitors is laughable because it basically boils down to two grown men repeatedly saying, “Come on, you can talk to me, baby,” to a woman who has absolutely no romantic interest in either of them. The twist ending, which I honestly didn’t see coming, is beyond stupid and arrives so far out of left field that I questioned my own intelligence for a second. Looking back at everything that transpired leading up to it, though, I came to the conclusion that it’s not me. It’s the movie that’s dumb.
Most egregious, though, is The Candy Cat Club itself, which never seems to have more than five patrons inside. The stripper-to-customer ratio is basically one to one, and I have reason to believe that this comes down to budget limitations. Most of the unintentional humor comes from the fact that every single dancer is fighting over turf and tips as if the handful of men in the club have enough dollar bills to go around. The funny part is that they somehow do make it rain, which made me wonder what these guys do for a living because they show up every single night.
Everything about Naked After Midnight is confusing. It’s supposed to be a revenge story, but once you get to the reveal, that premise is completely undermined, making the entire buildup feel pointless. At the same time, it’s so unintentionally hilarious that you kind of have to watch it if you’re looking for something insane to take your mind off things. But be warned: there’s a fair amount of nudity here, and nobody really knows how to dance, which somehow makes the whole thing even more awkward.
NAKED AFTER MIDNIGHT SCORE
As of this writing, you can stream Naked After Midnight for free on Tubi. You’ll need the ad breaks for this one, but you’ll laugh a few times too.
