The Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's performance of Bingo at times feels like playing bingo - hoping for a letter and number combination that you don't quite get, but finding yourself pleasantly surprised when you make a full card by the end.

The train rumbles toward you, and then it's over you, throwing sparks. It's a short train, but it's nonetheless a harrowing seven seconds - looking, sounding, and feeling uncomfortably real.

That's because, on a practical level, it is real.

This happens less than 10 minutes into the new, nationally distributed horror movie Nightlight by writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the filmmaking duo from the Quad Cities now based in Los Angeles.

"That whole sequence was a lot of fun to figure out," Beck said in a recent phone interview. The special-effects team proposed using computer animation for the train, he said, but he and Woods asked: "Could we actually get a real freight train on these tracks?"

We've been introduced to five teens who've come to a supposedly haunted forest for "flashlight games." One involves laying down a flashlight on railroad ties, running down the tracks to a specific point, and then running back and grabbing the flashlight. There's not much to it ... except for the train.

This bit lasts roughly a minute and 40 seconds, done in a single shot.

"The scene starts with the train incredibly far away, [and] it just gets closer and closer," Woods said.

We can only hear the train's horn as the first three people complete the task - getting louder with each blast. With the fourth teen, we can see the headlight peeking through the trees as the engine comes around a bend.

And after Shelby, our protagonist, puts her flashlight on the ties, we see the train itself, with her sprinting toward it and then back toward her flashlight.

She jumps away just before the train hits her, but her flashlight - which belonged to a friend who committed suicide and provides the point of view for all the movie's action - remains on the tracks, and the audience gets an unsettling understanding of what it would feel like to be under a freight train moving at full speed.

Agatha Christie's whodunit The Mousetrap is among my favorites in the genre, mostly due to the humor the author wrote into it, as well as the clues she included that make it possible to actually discern who did do it. Although the murderer's identity still comes as something of a shock, the game of figuring out the killer remains fun. I just wish the District Theatre's current production of the piece were as enjoyable.

I've noticed a common thread among amateur playwrights, in general, that gets me cringing a bit at the thought of seeing a locally-written play - or, in the case of the one-acts for New Ground Theatre's 2014 Playwrights Festival, several locally-written plays, which I viewed on Saturday evening. All too often, I've found these writers struggle with dialogue, particularly in regard to writing phrases and conversations in a manner in which people actually speak. I'm happy to say, however, that this is not the case with New Ground's presentation, as all four of its playwrights manage to provide believable dialogue and discussions, removing from the equation the distraction of annoyingly obvious and unrealistic speech.