Tuesday, October 30, 2018

October Horror Challenge 2018 #94: "The Dark (1979)"



I'm not sure if I've heard of this movie or not. I'm sure I heard of it at some time, but I don't remember it. The description and the way the movie is presented remind me of episodes of the show "The Twilight Zone," which I used to love when I was a kid, so I was hopeful that I would love this movie too.

So in this movie,  someone is on a killing spree in California,  killing and mutilating people at night. A writer and a TV reporter suspect that there's more to the story than meets the eye, that something not quite human is committing the murders. Soon their suspicions are confirmed, and they have to figure out how to stop the killings before it's too late.

The dark is always scarier. Things can be hiding in the shadows, evil and terrifying things. That's why so many people are afraid if the dark. This movie tries to play on those fears, and there are times when it really succeeds, when strange noises and an inability to see make the scenes extra spooky. There are other times, though, when the movie is heavy handed and annoying, when the darkness is whispering "blah blah blah...the dark..." and I want to punch whoever thought that would be scary instead of irritating. Dude. We get that it's dark, knock it off.

This movie feels like two movies. Like a bad movie swallowed a good movie whole, and the good movie keeps trying to escape from the bad movie, and we can hear it screaming for help, but it's trapped inside the bad movie and can't get out. If you cut the annoying whispers in the dark, and the omniscient narrator at the beginning and the end who pops up to infodump all over us, there would be a passably good movie in there somewhere,  but the heavy handed over-explainey bullshit gets in the way of anything good in the movie, which is annoying, because there could be a good movie here if it cut the crap. Boo. Hiss.

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