Fear in the Night

Rating:
Summary: Deforest Kelley in his first staring role.
Review: Let's face it this movie is pretty good but the real reason I got it is because it is DeForest Kelley in his first starring role. It is worth the price for that. The story is pretty good and the dream scenes were ok. But the acting is not at it's best. The worst thing is the lighting. Sometimes there were shadows where it was so dark I couldn't see what the characters were looking at. However, if you like Star Trek and old films this is pretty good. It is nice to see that Kelley had a chance to do other acting then science fiction and old TV westerns. Not bad for his freshman film.

Rating:
Summary: If only we could see it.
Review: This is a great old noir film, typical B-feature. I saw this as a child and was haunted for a few years by its eerieness. But, this DVD appears to be a copy of something shot off a movie screen with a camcorder and its visual quality is just at the threshold of human perception. The low price made it attractive enough to revive my memory of the more visible original.

Rating:
Summary: "I've got an honest man's conscience in a murderer's body!"
Review: This low-budget film noir is packed with creepy dream sequences, flashbacks, and dark shadows, but it's hardly what I'd call a classic. The acting ranges from wooden to over-the-top, and the plot has more holes than Babyface Nelson's corpse. I found it entertaining enough for a one-time viewing, but I don't think it's worth watching more than once. As a previous reviewer already noted, this noir would be far more enjoyable if the dvd picture and sound quality weren't so bad. Even though this was made during the "golden years" of film noir (late 1940's), I think you should pass on this poor quality dvd and get a true classic noir, like "Laura", "Double Indemnity", "Mildred Pierce", or "The Postman Always Rings Twice", just to name a few.

Rating:
Summary: A great old film noir movie starring DeForest Kelly
Review: Two decades before he boldly went where no man had gone before aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, DeForest Kelly starred in Fear in the Night, a vintage dark noir film (not to be confused with the 1972 Hammer film of the same name). Kelly plays a humble bank teller named Vince Grayson who awakens from a horrible dream, only to find that his nightmare may have been all too real. In the dream, he struggled with and then killed a man inside an odd octagonal room of mirrors. His relief upon waking up is dashed when he looks in the mirror and finds thumb marks on his neck. A quick self-inventory also reveals dried blood on his wrist and, most disturbingly of all, a key and button in his pocket, the very same items he grasped during his struggle in the dream. Naturally, he is both bewildered and horrified, and his need to talk about the situation leads him to his brother-in-law. Given the fact that his brother-in-law is a homicide detective, this doesn't strike me as the ideal plan. In any event, the guy doesn't believe him. A week later, Vince accompanies his sister and her cop husband as well as his own would-be sweetheart on a picnic. They seek shelter in a house at the beginning of a rainstorm, and wouldn't you know it, it's the same house as the one in Vince's dream. Things suddenly aren't looking too good for Vince, especially when he learns that a man was murdered in the house a week earlier. There's really only one fairly predictable way to explain these confusing events, yet the film still manages to maintain a significant amount of suspense up through its final moments. I found Fear in the Night to be quite a good film noir movie, complete with all the voiceovers and crescendo-happy music you would expect to find in this type of film.