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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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3
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9 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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On
its face, The Dark
shouldn't have turned out as bad as it ultimately
did. With a solid B-movie cast and a director
experienced in multiple facets of low budget moviemaking,
the film would seem to have at least a few things
going for it. Instead they cranked out what amounts
to little more than a color version of Monster
a-Go-Go. (At least that infamous
1965 turkey contains a handful of unintentional
laughs...)
The citizens
of Santa Monica, California are gripped in a panicked
state of fear when a vicious killer begins slaughtering
one random person a night, beheading and savagely
mutilating them. The cop leading the investigation,
Detective Mooney (The
Green Slime's Richard Jaeckel), is baffled
by the lack of any pattern to the murders. The
only connection between the slayings is the way
the murderer offs his victims, which soon has
the press dubbing him "The Mangler". Forensic
analysis leads nowhere. The perp leaves no fingerprints;
the only piece of physical evidence to be recovered,
a tiny sliver of skin thought to belong to the
killer, doesn't seem to be human in origin. When
asked if the tissue sample indicates the killer's
race — "Is he white,
black, yellow...?" —
the pathologist (Top 20 Countdown deejay
Casey Kasem) can only reply cryptically, "He's
gray."
An
eccentric professional psychic named Pandora DeRenzy
(Jacqueline Hyde) goes to the police claiming
to have seen visions of the Mangler striking again.
She says that a future victim will be a struggling
young actor, name unknown, whom she briefly met
at a party. Find this man and follow him, she
maintains, and eventually they'll confront the
killer. Det. Mooney instantly pegs her as a loon
and blows her off. He gets no closer to cracking
the case, however. Meanwhile, the father of the
Mangler's first victim, ex-con turned novelist
Roy Warner (Rolling Thunder's
William Devane), pursues his own investigation
with the help of Zoe Owens (Cathy Lee Crosby),
a TV reporter keen to scoop a 'hard' news story.
Contact with DeRenzy puts them on the trail of
the unknown victim of her prophecy, eventually
leading — just as
she predicted — to
a face-to-face encounter with the killer himself...
It takes something like eighty
friggin' minutes for all this to go down before
the finale involving the monster. Until the climax
he's glimpsed only fleetingly, when another nightly
victim is claimed. The vast bulk of the film is
consumed with pointless backstory and plot threads
that go absolutely nowhere — and I mean NOWHERE.
We get plenty of banter between Mooney and his
dimwitted partner (Biff Eliot) as they make zero
progress on the case and are occasionally chewed
out by their bellicose captain (Warren Kemmerling);
Owens' crusty producer (Keenan Wynn) first tries
to dissuade her from personally covering such
a gruesome story, later warning her about sensationalizing
the reporting; Warner and Mooney hate each other
(Mooney was the cop who sent him to prison); Owens
and Warner eventually strike up a romance. Virtually
none of this ends up having anything to do with,
well... anything. The film meanders around
to no real purpose, merely treading water in between
the (infrequent) monster attacks.
But at
least there is a monster, right? Yes, there
is — an eight-foot
tall space alien who's super-strong and shoots
deadly laser beams out of his eyes. (Played by
John Bloom of Al Adamson's Dracula
vs. Frankenstein). It didn't start out that
way, though. The script originally concerned a
demonic, supernatural creature —
but with filming already well underway, producers
Edward L. Montoro and Dick (American Bandstand)
Clark suddenly decided that they wanted the story
to be sci-fi themed rather than straight horror.
(???) Apparently, the success of Star
Wars prompted the inclusion of a laser-firing
extraterrestrial no matter the cost to narrative
coherence. That's why the cops talk about some
of the victims being beheaded even though we just
saw said victims being incinerated by the creature's
ocular power beams. No amount of last-minute rewrites
could paper over the resulting mess, which in
the end offers no real explanation for anything...
Why is the alien here? Why does he look like a
very tall Mr. Hyde dressed as street bum? Why
is he killing one human per night? Why is a psychic
somehow supernaturally attuned to his presence?
Insultingly bad narration is tacked onto the end
in an effort to placate any audience members still
awake: "Of the millions of possible alien confrontations,
Man has had his first —
an encounter for which he has no understanding
or explanation..."
See what
I mean? Monster
a-Go-Go redux.
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I don't understand why this film was ever rated
R by the MPAA. It contains no gore, no nudity and
very little foul language — strictly PG content.
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For some reason Media Blasters,
under the company's Shriek Show imprint, has deigned
to issue this loser of a monster movie in a truly
deluxe DVD edition. The keepcase packaging is
enclosed in an attractive cardboard sleeve utilizing
the film's luridly eye catching, horror comic-style
poster art. As for the contents, the film's 2.35:1
widescreen/16x9 enhanced transfer is quite good,
exhibiting only fleeting instances of print damage
so minor as to be negligible. Scenes that were
way too murky on VHS or in TV broadcasts are now
much easier to discern, although not revelatory
— it appears that
the flick was deliberately underlit to camouflage
the rather lame monster and total lack of gore
effects. (It ain't called The
Dark for nothin', y'all!) A clear, solid
mono audio mix serves the dialog, sound effects
and (especially) music quite well, marred only
by a brief, second-long burst of static that doesn't
step on anyone's lines. Wisely, the disc's
extras focus more on director John "Bud Cardos
(Kingdom
of the Spiders) than the film itself. A stunt
man, actor, production assistant and general jack-of-all-trades
on a host of low budget drive-in features in the
'60s and '70s, he has lots of stories to tell
in both a 16-minute interview featurette and a
full-length audio commentary. The
Dark is duly covered — Cardos explains
how he was brought in to take over the shoot by
his friend Dick Clark when original director Tobe
Hooper was fired — but the really interesting
stuff concerns his work on other projects.
12/27/05
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