One Dark Night

One Dark Night (1983) is one of those low-budget, b-grade, indie horror movies from the '80s that was 'lost' for awhile awaiting a DVD distributor. Along came Shriek Show to the rescue, specializing in rare, cult, indie, and foreign horror. Shriek Show has been responsible for bringing some great film from the Italian school of horror to American viewers. Highlights include The Church (1989), Michele Soavi's atmospheric tale of a demonic portal, and Massamo Dellamano's giallo, What Have They Done to Solange? (1972). Unfortunately, Shriek Show's contributions to DVD distribution also include some of the dregs of cinema: the putrid Elsa Fraulein SS (1977), and the pointless and vile exploitation flick Violence in a Women's Prison (1982). Tom McLoughlin's One Dark Night falls a little to the positive side of the middle. The film is mercifully free of over-the-top exploitation and gore, but the acting is wooden, and the effects are inconsistent.

High schooler Julie (Meg Tilly) has always wanted to be one of the 'Sisters,' a sorority-esque clique of popular girls. She just has one more initiation stunt to pull: a night alone in a creepy mausoleum. But you can bet that the head Sister, Carol, isn't going to make it easy on Julie, especially since Julie recently stole Carol's boyfriend. The sisters are planning a night of pranks at Julie's expense, but they haven't counted on the mausoleum's newest resident: the late Karl Raymar, notorious occultist, psychic, and telekinetic. When Raymar rises from the dead and begins to assemble a corpse army, it's up to Julie's boyfriend and Raymar's daughter to come to Julie's rescue.

This movie's not bad. Had the director had some decent acting, One Dark Night might even have been good. The film's major flaw is acting. Let's put it this way: the best actor out of this crop is Adam West. That's right, the man made famous by slinging really fake punches and really lame one-liners as TV's Batman is the best this film's got. The rest of the acting is clichéd, hackneyed, or just plain bad. Meg Tilly is so monumentally wooden that they have to give her character narcotics just to try and cover for her. It doesn't work. Problem is, she's exactly the same both before and after taking demerol.

For another thing, the pace is glacial. It takes forever just to get into the mausoleum. Then it takes yet another forever for some serious shit to start going down. And interspersed in what should be the frenzied climax of the film are cut scenes of Raymar's daughter taking an excruciatingly long time to realize what everyone else including the audience already knows: that Raymar is one powerful telekinetic and he's come back from beyond the grave to raise some corpses and harvest some psychic energy from his terrified victims. And speaking of Raymar, when his big bad psychic ass is finally revealed.... well, he's about the least frightening thing of the entire film. Standing motionless in his upright coffin, swathed in a totally inexplicable pink glow, with cheesy CGI lightning bolts exuding from his eyes (to signify his telekinesis at work, I suppose), the great Raymar is nothing but an ineffectual corpse-like mannequin.

The rest of the reanimated dead, however, are really well done, considering the standards of the day. Using real cadavers (yikes!), make-up effects, and good old fashioned puppetry, the dead are brought to life in glorious detail, reflecting a realistic variability in level of decomposition. In contrast to Raymar, these corpses are actually frightening to a degree, especially when combined with Cricket Rowland's great set work on the mausoleum. The antiseptic white marble of the mausoleum projects an eerie coldness, and the camerawork by Hal Trussel gives the appearance of immensity, row after row, hall after hall of blank white marble and iron placards holding in the ranks of moldering corpses. The rest of Trussel's cinematography is equally great, including a harrowing shot featuring two of the Sisters opposite a slowly opening casket, surrounded by the gloom of the mausoleum and the settling dust from pulverized marble walls.

The lesson here is patience, I guess. If you can make it through the snooze-inducing first half, you'll be rewarded with some truly good film towards the end, as long as you can stop laughing every time they cut to Raymar's face. Hey, at least he's entertaining is some way.

Storyline & plot: 4/10
Cinematography & effects: 8/10
Music & mood: 7/10
Performances: 3/10

The Reverend says: 6/10