Into the Dark: Midnight Kiss (2020)

Into the Dark's January entry is an appropriately dark and tense tale of an annual New Year celebration ritual among a bunch of gay best friends (plus a straight female friend) which returns to haunt them in a bloody and twisted outcome that they never expected. The name of their game is Midnight Kiss which involves dare to each other for getting a New Year consensual kiss from a stranger even when some of them were already in a relationship with each other.

I found this episode a worthy entry in the Into the Dark series as it was very well made with enough nasty killings and scary moments to support the 90 minutes running time nicely. However a word of caution though, this episode may put some people off as it is heavy with (male) nudity and gay smooching! So stay far far away if you find such scenes offensive. What we do have in the midst of all these visual distractions, is a tense killer / slasher genre. The killer is not revealed until towards the ending by which time the audience would probably have guessed "whodunit" by the simple logic of elimination as the cast of characters is very small. Some of the death scenes were disgusting and cringe worthy as they leave little to our imagination. My main complaint to the episode is the killer's motive which seemed pretty lame compared to the level of sadistic cruelty commited by the killer to  his victims.

Nevertheless January's entry continues to bring hope to the Into the Dark second season as it seems to reflect an overall higher quality as well as better linkage of the stories with the monthly themes. As I said the big advantage of such anthology series is that they can afford to be creative and that there are no rules. Hence the level of unpredictability can be used to its advantage in the episodes to it more interesting.