THE HORN BLOWS AT MIDNIGHT (1945)

Third string trumpeter, Jack Benny, falls asleep one evening during a live broadcast for Paradise Coffee, "The Coffee that Makes You Sleep".  He dreams that he's an angel in Heaven.  And because the people of Earth are being naughty, Jack has been selected to blow the judgement call on a magic trumpet that will destroy the Earth. He's sent down to Earth on a magic elevator with the instructions to blow the horn at exactly midnight.

Naturally if he did that this wouldn't be much of a movie so all kinds of things stand in his way, including two fallen angels looking to steal his trumpet, two beautiful women, his discovery of food and swing music. Oh yeah, he also gets fired out of a cannon and then later falls off a skyscraper into a cup of coffee.

Overall, I thought it was pretty funny. I giggled a few times and enjoyed myself the entire way through. Benny had a few snappy lines and the story had a few clever moments like the lack of angel power in Heaven, the endless bureaucracy in Heaven and the elevator from Heaven to Earth lands in a hotel, much to the irritation of the guests. My favorite thing though was all the great faces: Jack Benny, Alexis Smith, John Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Allyn Joslyn, Dolores Moran, Mike Mazurki and Franklin Pangborn, plus others! And we can't forget the direction by Raoul Walsh. Check it out.

YOU'RE NEXT (2011)

You're next...to fall asleep.

If you insist on wasting your time watching this unoriginal clunker do yourself a favor and immediately skip to chapter 4 on the blu-ray. That'll be the 22:50 mark.  The only thing that happens before that point is two dorks in a neighbor's house get killed off-camera and then at the main house some family members gather and talk for nearly 20 minutes about random stuff.  Finally everybody arrives and they sit down for dinner...when an arrow shoots through the window and kills a hipster.  Other arrows follow.  Is it a band of time-traveling Native American Indians on the warpath?  No, just some dorks in dollar store masks that like to tilt their heads when they kill somebody.  The cell phones have been jammed, nobody has a gun, this huge mansion doesn't have a security system and I guess the internet hasn't been invented yet so there's no way to get help.  Logic would tell you to keep together and assess the situation, but no, these champions immediately go into full panic mode and just run all over the place like chickens with their dicks cut off until the weak twist ending that seems to be a requirement in the majority of modern horror films. 

Zero nudity, blood that made me want to go eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...mmmmm strawberry, zero gore, inept killers, zero scares, dozens of tired horror movie cliches, killer under the bed (twice), HOME ALONE-style booby traps, orange blood, logic out the window, innocent mask head tilt, hipsters, running back into danger, seeing a booby trap and still somehow stepping into it, flashing light, cop shooting the wrong person, annoying music and quite possibly the most unstable camera of all time.  CLOVERFIELD looks like an Ozu movie compared to this seasick turkey.

I'm sure if you look hard enough there's some positives in YOU'RE NEXT, but I still can't see any reason why you should watch it.  My friend who brought this over to watch actually apologized after it was over...and he slept through half of it!