10 Greatest Movies About One Crazy Night, Ranked

Almost everyone has had that one crazy night, one that might make you reassess your life choices or maybe just your circle of friends. These nights can come out of nowhere or can be the culmination of dozens of unfortunate events leading up to them, but regardless of where they came from, they are never less than memorable. Lucky for most people, the crazy nights they experience are generally not on the level of lunacy as those portrayed in movies.

“One Crazy Night” movies come in all shapes and sizes. They cross genres, from comedy to action, sometimes within the same film, and offer everything from laughs and outrage to tense thrills and unimaginable horrors. There’s a wide swath of these movies to choose from, and their diversity makes objectively comparing them a fool’s errand, but I am just that fool to do so and give you all a list of the greatest movies that take place over one crazy night.

10

‘Game Night’ (2018)

There are plenty of one crazy night comedies as well as one crazy night thrillers, and those that blend the two. One of the most unique is Game Night, the second feature film from directing duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, after their ill-fated Vacation franchise reboot. It is set over one crazy game night where a group of friends, who engage in intense competitions, find themselves embroiled in a real-life kidnapping mystery that will have them relying on all their skills to solve it.

The cast is the perfect mix of comedic and dramatic pros, led by Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams as the most competitive couple, and Jesse Plemons wins the entire movie as an awkwardly intense neighbor. The script is incredibly clever as well, but the movie’s secret weapon is in its visuals, which not only give it the sheen of a dark thriller but also utilize tilt-shift lenses in establishing shots to make the characters and setting appear as if they were on an actual game board. It’s the best kind of movie about the worst kind of game night.

9

‘Superbad’ (2007)

Teen comedies lend themselves to the format of one crazy night. They provide a perfect snapshot that can encapsulate both the coming-of-age drama and wacky hijinks that come with raging hormones. American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused are wonderfully nostalgic paeans to different eras of youth, but their respective nights are more wild and fun than flat-out crazy. Can’t Hardly Wait and Booksmart both lean more into crazy comedy, but if there’s one fictional night of teens that reigns supreme, it’s Superbad.

Coming from writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and based on their teenage partying experiences, there’s a sad authenticity to the nocturnal misadventures of mild-mannered Evan (Michael Cera), foul-mouthed Seth (Jonah Hill), and fan-favorite McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as they try to lose their virginity before graduating. Superbad is crude but sweet, heartfelt but horny, and above all, it’s all about one crazy night.

8

‘The Warriors’ (1979)

Shifting from fits of laughter to fits of rage, there’s Walter Hill‘s journey into the night: The Warriors. Set in a comic-book styled New York City where colorful gangs roam the streets, this late-70s thrill ride follows the titular group as they make their way to the Bronx for an all-gang meeting where they are framed for the death of a respected leader and have to fight their way back home to Coney Island.

The Warriors is filled with Hill’s signature hard-edged action but also mixes in healthy doses of camp in the themed gangs that stand in the way of the heroes. The movie has become a massive cult-favorite of action fans, and has spawned comic books, an underrated video game and a semi-remake in the form of the final act of John Wick: Chapter 4. It’s a pulpy actioner set over one crazy night in the city that’s a borough-to-borough brawl.

7

‘Collateral’ (2004)

If you’re more West Coast than East Coast, Michael Mann has the perfect one crazy night thriller for you in his Los Angeles odyssey of a hitman and a cab driver, Collateral. Tom Cruise is Vincent, the kind of hyper-meticulous professional assassin that only really exists in movies, and Jamie Foxx is Max, an everyman cabbie who’s mostly devoid of the megawatt charisma that Foxx has in spades, and wisely suppresses here. Vincent commandeers Max’s taxi, forcing him to chauffeur him around L.A. for one night as he carries out his hits.

Shot mostly on high definition digital video, the movie has a distinct visual style that emphasizes both the noir attitude of the movie and its concrete jungle setting. Cruise and Foxx make for a tense, antagonistic pairing, which is the motor that drives the film from crime scene to crime scene. The intimacy with which Mann captures their standoffs punctuates the film as it speeds towards a head-on collision of violence in the climax. It’s one nonstop crazy night of killing and cool visuals.

6

‘Green Room’ (2015)

Sometimes the most intense nights aren’t the ones that take characters from one end of a city to the other, but instead are those spent trapped in one location, especially if they’re trapped by skinheads led by Patrick Stewart. Jeremy Saulnier‘s Green Room is a claustrophobic siege thriller that takes glee in violently subverting expectations as its punk rock protagonists attempt to escape the titular setting after witnessing a murder perpetrated by the neo-Nazi proprietors of the club they’ve just played a gig in.

The film tightly coils its plot as each escape attempt is thwarted and results in bloody, abject failure. Saulnier gets a lot of mileage out of the limited setting thanks to a sharp cast of young actors and the old pro Stewart, who plays the bigoted patriarch figure with such nonchalant gruffness that it only intensifies how intimidating he is. One crazy night doesn’t do Green Room justice for just how insane the night gets for its characters. It’s panic-inducing and gut-wrenching in equal measure, making for the leanest and meanest kind of Saturday night special.

5

‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (1976)

Most modern siege thrillers owe a massive debt to John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13, which itself was a modern spin on the John Wayne-Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo. This gritty, low-budget action movie sees cops and criminals joining together to defend a dilapidated precinct building against a gang of killers who have sworn a blood oath to destroy. With the same kind of widescreen anamorphic visuals and tightly composed blocking as in his follow-up, horror classic, Halloween, this predecessor presaged many of the Carpenter signatures that would proliferate throughout his career in film.

For being a nearly fifty-year-old independent film, Assault still manages to carry a palpable sense of dread from the opening moments as the police ambush and gun down a group of gang members, all the way through the movie’s still most shocking moment of violence involving a little girl with an ice cream cone. The poster for the movie promised “a white-hot night of hate.” It delivers that and more in a contemporary Western with old-fashioned thrills mixed with exploitation values.

4

‘Evil Dead II’ (1987)

Hard-edged thrillers like Green Room and Assault on Precinct 13 bump right up against the barrier to full-blown horror without ever breaking through, but there are plenty of true-blue horror movies that take place over one crazy night. Halloween is all about the night he came home, but it’s more interested in suspense than getting truly crazy. Meanwhile, Demon Knight and The Cabin in the Woods both offer plenty of madcap madness, but if there’s one crazy night in a remote location that still holds dominion, it’s that experienced by Ashley J. Williams in Evil Dead II.

In Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell‘s sequel to their wild original, they up the ante on every aspect, making a gorier, funnier wackadoo sequel that truly had no parallels when it was released. At its core, the Evil Dead franchise is all about a cosmically screwed man suffering one violent indignity after another after foolishly unleashing ancient demon deadites into the world. The second film explores that idea to its fullest, all within the confines of its classic horror setting, and it does it all over one crazy, blood-soaked night.

3

‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)

The granddaddy of all bad nights in horror movies, George A. Romero‘s iconic classic Night of the Living Dead not only invented the modern zombie movie, but its contained setting and unwavering hordes of the undead have influenced everything in and out of its genre, including the aforementioned siege thrillers. Shot on a low budget in grainy black and white with a cast filled with local actors, Night of the Living Dead is pure independent cinema that changed the shape of horror over its one crazy night.

Inspired by Richard Matheson‘s novel I Am Legend, Romero updated its post-apocalyptic setting to one experiencing the first waves of societal collapse and brought in flesh-eating ghouls as opposed to daylight-averse vampires. Romero’s film also finds fertile social commentary in exploring the conflict between the lead character Ben, played by Black actor Duane Jones, and his fellow shelter seekers. While Romero has repeatedly stated that Jones’ casting was mere happenstance by virtue of him being the strongest actor, the film’s imagery is still starkly reminiscent of the social upheaval that was happening in America in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, as well as the violence of the Vietnam War, in the final haunting still images.

2

‘After Hours’ (1985)

The Yuppie Nightmare Cycle is a title that’s been bestowed upon a loose movement of darkly comedic films from the ’80s and ’90s that put their young urban professional protagonists through the ringer. It includes everything from David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet, Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild, and the one crazy night of Martin Scorsese‘s After Hours. Made during a transitional period in Scorsese’s career, After Hours is markedly different than most of the films he made before or after it, with a few exceptions, and presents an anxiety-driven detour into the dark corners of Lower Manhattan.

It stars Griffin Dunne as an office drone who ventures out to SoHo to meet a mysterious woman he met in a cafe. Thus begins a strange night involving burglaries, deaths, and papier-mache. It’s a fever dream of a movie that ranks as one of Scorsese’s most underrated among his filmography, though it is just as immaculate in its details of the city as in Taxi Driver or Mean Streets, perhaps even more terrifying. It’s one crazy night that will have you laughing out of sheer discomfort.

1

‘Die Hard’ (1988)

The craziest that most office Christmas parties get is an unexpected hookup in the janitor’s closet. They don’t often end in explosions and gunfights across 40 stories of sheer adventure as befalls NYPD cop John McClane in the all-time action classic Die Hard. The movie made a star out of Bruce Willis, and its perfectly balanced premise led to dozens of imitators, none of which ever recaptured the magic of its one crazy night.

Whether it’s McClane sending a chair full of C-4 down an elevator shaft, coke-fueled Ellis catching a bullet from trying hard to sell Hans Gruber, or Gruber himself taking a swan dive out the window, every crazy moment of Die Hard has become an indelible part of action cinema that has been endlessly dissected and discussed for decades. Director John McTiernan and his collaborators set a high bar for action filmmaking through the precise cutting, dynamic camerawork and sophisticated choreography that make Die Hard a night to remember.