The Dark

The Dark (1979)

Runtime: 93 minutes

Directed by: John “Bud” Cardos... and Tobe Hooper

Starring: William Devane, Cathy Lee Crosby, Richard Jaeckel, Keenan Wynn, Warren J. Kemmerling

From: Film Ventures International

Tuesday night, I watched this lousy movie on Amazon Prime, which has a lousy version of it, print-wise... it's fullscreen and looks directly ripped from VHS. Even in a better print, this would still be lousy, as I explain below:

This was another movie I watched on Amazon Prime, although this is something I've known of for years. I only saw it last night due to it having a rather rotten reputation. I'll note that the copy you can stream on Amazon is fullscreen and the print looks like a direct rip from VHS; that said, if I had seen this in a 4K scan done by Criterion and released by them on Blu-ray, I'd still say this was a bad motion picture.

The important thing to say about this movie was that it had its production woes. Tobe Hooper was the original director; I understand he was fired because he was “working too slow”, but I have heard that in the past he had various issues with various things that affected his ability to direct well-and I'll leave it at that-and maybe that was part of it too. Then, the original plot was-according to what I hear-about an autistic person who was locked in a house his entire life and after a fire he escapes, but not before dying... it is mentioned multiple times that he was a ZOMBIE.

Late into shooting, because Alien was popular, they did reshoots and the killer changed, but they left in the references to “zombie”! Instead he was a 10 foot tall alien... who happens to look like a rotting human being that usually was normal-sized. This “alien” shot laser beams out of his eyes. I realize that sounds like a real good time; trust me, it is not, at all. Those effects are howlingly bad and it leads to a hilarious finale, but that's about it for entertainment value.

Really, this movie is poorly made and also boring as hell. Scenes appear to be put together at random, scenes flow together in a rather unnatural way, it appears as if entire reels of the movie are missing. What you end up seeing is a bunch of nonsense that just about put me to sleep, killings mainly done in the dark or off-camera, William Devane being a dad who is after the killer because the first victim was his daughter (in the beginning he looks like a burnout hippie, making me laugh as I imagined him as Charles Rane having lost his mind after the events of Rolling Thunder; in actuality, the character is an author who people speculate was based on Stephen King, believe it or not), Cathy Lee Crosby as a TV reporter, a psychic is involved, somehow the alien has a telepathic relationship with a young actor... utter nonsense. If they had left the killer a zombie and hadn't done those reshoots, this still would be a giant piece of crap.

In short, despite a decent cast and the kitsch value of Dick Clark being one of the producers (which is why CASEY KASEM had a small role), there is no real reason to see a movie that should have been better, or at least actually scary.