The 80s marked the twilight years of Charles Bronson’s run as an action hero. He spent most of the decade churning out action films for The Cannon Group, with Death Wish III and Death Wish IV: The Crackdown two notable examples. Yet, of all the movies he made with them, one of the more popular titles was 10 to Midnight, which did something a little different, in that it melded the cop films he was known for with the then-nascent slasher genre. And now, the movie, which was wildly controversial for its nasty flashes of violence, is heading to 4K Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber. No release date is set yet, but the company has promised it’s being completed from a new 4K master.
In 10 to Midnight, Bronson plays a cop who’s going after a serial killer targeting young women. When he catches the killer (Gene Davis) red-handed, he’s forced to turn him loose due to an illegal search, so the cop turns vigilante and starts stalking him outside the law, inadvertently putting his daughter (Beverly Hills Cop’s Lisa Eilbacher) in the killer’s crosshairs.
If you haven’t seen 10 to Midnight, be warned, it’s pretty extreme. It’s much more of a slasher movie than a cop movie, with heavy-duty murder sequences, and a cast of young victims that include a Kelly Preston in one of her first roles. Critics reviled it at the time for its scuzzy, low-budget vibe, but it became a fave among horror movie fans, and was a VHS staple of the early 80s. The director, J. Lee Thompson, was one of Bronson’s go-to directors, and several of their movies together really pushed boundaries in terms of the kind of sex and violence you’d see in movies like this. Their follow-up, The Evil That Men Do, was pretty rough, while their latter film, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, has two unlikely fans in directors Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, who often name-check the movie on their Video Archives Podcast.
Will you be picking up 10 to Midnight when it hits 4K Blu-ray next year? Let us know in the comments.
