ALONE IN THE DARK (1982)

ALONE IN THE DARK (1982)

Tagline: When the lights go out, the terror begins.

(Horror, Thriller, Freaks Come Out At Night) [R]

There are no crazy people, doctor, we're all just on vacation.

In this one, after a power outage, some mental patients wreak havoc on a town while trying to find their new doctor to kill him, because they believe he killed the last one. Meanwhile, it becomes apparent that Dr. Dan Potter, his wife and 2 daughters will have to take a stand fortifying their home with a police officer and a kind stranger in tow. 

First off, this movie does have a crazy twist at the end, but you can kind of see it coming from a mile away (or at least I did). One thing this movie does nicely is ramp up of the creepy factor even using seemingly harmless characters.  Jack Palance (WITHOUT WARNING) is sufficiently creepy in this thing as Frank Hawkes and we never actually see him kill anyone on screen. We also get an even creepier Martin Landau (WITHOUT WARNING) as ‘Preacher’ and finally Donald Pleasence as Dr. Leo Bain who is also pretty creepy. Pleasence is best known for the first 2 HALLOWEEN films, but I am also kind of wondering if this was a subtle way of connecting the HALLOWEEN and ALONE IN THE DARK films. Mostly because Pleasence essentially plays the same character in both movies only with different names. I don’t think this was ever intended to be a series, but the idea could have been expanded into one. 

ALONE IN THE DARK was the first full-length movie distributed by NEW LINE CINEMA. It was also one of the first films to use Dolby Stereo Sound. Allegedly it blew out the speakers in some other theaters. 

As far as just being weird and out of control this movie is pretty good, but I really didn’t like any of the characters. Usually, I can find a few to get behind, but overall any character development we do get just makes me like the Potter family even less. When it comes to the score this one is solid and we even get a scene that required the efforts of makeup effects artist Tom Savini. It is possible that part of why I didn’t like anyone is because the dude playing the main “good guy” is Dwight Schultz who has made a career out of playing creepy German dudes but has recently moved quite a bit into voice work for cartoons like “Ben 10” and "Happy Halloween Scooby-Doo!”.

Even with 3 horror and cinematic icons in this film, it wasn’t enough to fix the issue with this one. I get the concept, but it feels so jumbled for most of its run time, it feels like this was the idea for 4 or 5 different movies crammed together to try and give us a movie that would fit neatly into the “slasher” genre. Instead, it’s more of a psychological and psychiatric film sort of burrito-ed into a package that was meant to take advantage of the height of the “slashers” popularity. This isn’t to say we don’t get some slashing, so who knows, for a lot of people this is a “slasher”.

I guess this thing actually got banned in the UK for a while. I am not really sure why, it’s not overly gory or anything like that. Perhaps it was because it paints some mental patients in a really bad light? Anyway, overall in spite of its eerie nature, my mind it’s blown by this one, and I don't think it’s all that great. 

I give this one a 4 out of 7, which is pretty solid but not in the upper echelon of horror films. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF NEW LINE CINEMA AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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