ALONE IN THE DARK (1982)

A HAVEN FOR DARK DREAMS

Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - June 30, 1983

Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Movie Reviewer

"Alone in the Dark." A thriller starring Dwight Schultz, Jack Palance, Donald Pleasence and Martin Landau. Written and directed by Jack Sholder. Photographed by Joseph Mangine. Edited by Arline Garson. Music by Rentao Serio. Running Time: 92 minutes. In area theaters.

Jack Sholder's "Alone in the Dark," I am happy to report, is a tidy little thriller that deserves to surmount the overall disagreeable reputation that the splatter genre has earned.

It is more than a little competent, often brutal and surprisingly witty as it kicks off a series of trauma dramas, each set in either a very clinical asylum or an attractively creaky country home where everything is dark, dark, dark, thanks to a convenient electrical blackout.

The horrorfest kicks off with a nightmare. Martin Landau - playing a character called The Preacher, a chap with pyromaniacal tendencies - wakes up screaming from a recurring dream that has him being castrated by a cleaver- toting butcher, Donald Pleasence. Landau sweats a lot during his bloody
dream work.

Cut to: a shrink's office, where a most serene Pleasence is greeting his new assistant, Dan Potter (the stage actor Dwight Schultz).

As it turns out, he's the director - or mad doctor - of a New Jersey mental asylum called The Haven. Here, the patients are called "voyagers" and their stay is described as a "vacation." There's no violence at The Haven, despite the free-flowing blood, just a lot of "cries of pain."

Pleasence, as Dr. Leo Bain, turns out to be the screwiest outpatient at The Haven, and he has a lot of competition: Besides The Preacher, there's Fatty (Erland Van Lidth), a child molester; The Bleeder (Phillip Clark), a chap who gets a nosebleed whenever he kills someone, and Hawkes (Jack Palance), a gung-ho warmonger. All are incurable.

Cut to: The Potter homestead, where we meet Dr. Dan's sexy, liberated wife (Deborah Hedwall), his sexy, punky sister (Lee Taylor-Allan) and his daughter (Elizabeth Ward), just the kind of child that Fatty likes to molest. Anyway, the aforementioned blackout loosens The Haven's security system, and the psychos bust loose.

"Alone in the Dark" then swings to and fro between the asylum and Dan's house. The men have an uncontrollable urge to dismember and/

or kill Dan because they believe he killed his predecessor, the beloved Dr. Harry Murton, who actually is alive and well and working in a hospital in Wynnefield, Pa.

Sholder neatly contrasts the certifiable behavior of the patients with the panicky behavior of the usually laidback Potter clan, and he has come up with one particularly clever twist (involving The Bleeder).

"Alone in the Dark" also is more eloquent than other films of its ilk and has the kind of humor that perfectly balances the gore. "All right!" Pleasence finally (and calmly) admits. "All right, they're crazy." A pause. ''Isn't everyone?"

One of the most engaging aspects of "Alone in the Dark" (running a close second to Schultz's very appealing performance) is that Potter's home is
somehow much creepier than the asylum.
Parental Guide: Rated R for its intense violence and adult language