REVIEW / MOVIE\ BOOGEY MAN' DEEP IN GRATUITOUS GORE\ THE BOOGEY MAN - WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY ULLI LOMMEL. STARRING\ SUZANNA LOVE, RON JAMES, AND JOHN CARRADINE. AT THE SACK CINEMA 57\ AND SUBURBS. RATED R. Boston Globe - November 27, 1980
Author: MICHAEL BLOWEN
People are easily frightened. A flight of dark stairs leading to a musty basement or the creak of a door will send our hearts fluttering and perk up our ears. It's an automatic, primal response.
Filmmakers, more than any other show businessmen, realize that we're cowards and that fear is an emotion that can be easily manipulated. All they need is a dark house, a psychopathic killer and a young woman. It's a formula with inexpensive ingredients that can yield big profits.
"The Boogey Man" is merely the latest entry in the slash and bash sweepstakes. A young woman, obsessed with the murder of her mother's boyfriend by her younger brother, is beset by nightmares. Her husband, the stiff rationalist, insists that it's all in her imagination. But that's not the case.
It seems the maniacal ghost of the victim is trapped in a mirror and attacks anyone whose image catches its reflective gaze.
By the time the mirror is put to rest, it has drawn more blood than the local chapter of the Red Cross. A boy has his neck broken by a slamming
window; a girl has her chest punctured by a pair of scissors; an old man is pinned against the wall of a barn by a pitchfork through his neck; an old woman is strangled by a garden hose; the blade of a knife enters the back of a teenager's neck and comes out his mouth just before his girlfriend is compelled, by forces beyond her control, to give him a final kiss. She dies in his skinny arms.
This is not frightening, it's repulsive. Your eyes reel back from the screen in disgust, rather than horror. It's the oozing blood that repels you, not the well-crafted tension of a genuinely frightening movie such as "Don't Look Now" or "Dressed to Kill."
The economics of horror films featuring no-name actresses, such as Suzanna Love, and bulging advertising budgets are a good investment. The overhead is low (usually under $1 million) and the profit potential is high (" Halloween " returned 18 times its capital investment). Unfortunately, no matter how many times moviegoers have been disappointed by a horror movie that promises more in its commercials than it delivers on the screen, crowds continue to buy tickets.
If you're one of those people, you better watch out. "The Boogey Man" is going to get you. Don't say you weren't warned.
REVIEW / MOVIE\ A MILDLY SCARY SCREAM'\ SILENT SCREAM - DIRECTED BY DENNY HARRIS. WRITTEN BY KEN WHEAT, JIM\ WHEAT AND WALLACE C. BENNETT. STARRING REBECCA BALDING, BARBARA STEELE,\ YVONNE DE CARLO, CAMERON MITCHELL AND\ AVERY SCHREIBER. AT THE SACK SAXON AND SUBURBS. RATED R.
Boston Globe - November 19, 1980
Author: Michael Blowen Globe Correspondent
A strange Victorian house overlooks the Pacific. The lace curtains flutter. The stairs leading to the attic are covered with cobwebs. The doors creak and Yvonne De Carlo is hidden away in an upstairs room.
A conventional setting for an exploitation horror film. In fact, everything about "Silent Scream" is conventional. But, given the avalanche of recent slice-and-dice films, it's not bad. After "Prom Night," "Terror Train," "Fade To Black," and "Motel Hell," "Silent Scream" is a welcome relief.
It's not a masterpiece. The acting is mediocre, the script pedestrian and the direction inconsistent. But it has enough cheap thrills to keep you riveted to your seat for its inconsequential 90 minutes.
Cameron Mitchell of television's "The High Chaparral" and Avery Schreiber, the Frito bandido, are a pair of police detectives trying to solve the bizarre murder of a wealthy, snobbish college student who lived in the house by the sea. The grisly manner of the death (the young man was knifed to death and buried in the sand) leads Mitchell and Schreiber back to the house. By the time these two lame-brained investigators discover the truth, several more gruesome murders occur.
The character actors, dredged up from the past, are fascinating. Yvonne De Carlo plays a puffy matron who spends the entire film in a frumpy housedress. Barbara Steele, once crowned Queen of the Bs for her many roles in serials and Republic features, doesn't have a line, but her performance is invested with chilling terror. Mitchell and Shreiber merely get in and out of a few cars.
Director Denny Harris, like most every other horror exploiter, steals most of his bits from Hitchcock. The sequence of killings looks as if he studied "Psycho" and made carbon copies. But he does show the ability to maintain suspense. In one frightening scene, while a young woman climbs up the attic stairs, Harris maintains tension by altering camera angles and quick cuts. It's frightening.
In spite of its obvious flaws, "Silent Scream" is the best low-budget horror film since " Halloween ." If that sounds like damning with faint praise, so be it.
A film directed by Paul Lynch. Screenplay by William Gray. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Leslie Nielson, Antoinette Bower and a host of unknowns. At the Sack Saxon and suburbs. Rated R.
My senior prom was a horror show. Everyone dressed in rented formal wear and danced to the music of the Eddie Corcoran Trio. We were kids dressed up like mini-adults indulging in a fantasy conceived and executed by our parents and the school administrators. It wasn't much fun.
Neither is "Prom Night," a low-budget exploitation film, imported from Canada, to fill this summer's quota of quickie horror movies.
The plot is predictably sophomoric. A killer, who six years earlier observed four children forcing a little girl out of the window of a deserted schoolhouse to her death, is stalking the hallways of Alexander Hamilton High School. He seeks revenge.
The concept of a maniac returning to avenge injustice is certainly not new to the genre. " Halloween ," John Carpenter's bargain basement horror film, is only the most recent example. But "Prom Night" isn't half as frightening as Carpenter's movie.
Except for the pre-credit sequence, when the four children tease the little girl by chanting, "The Killer's Coming, The Killer's Coming," as the camera darts around the dark, deserted hallways, there is little else that's terrifying. And when people aren't frightened at horror movies, when the situations are as ridiculous as those presented in this slice and dice exploiter, people begin to laugh. And "Prom Night" is laughable.
The entire cast must have flunked algebra at least 10 times. They all look old enough to be dancing the bop and, when Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens, the King and Queen of the prom, start to disco, it's uproarious. Their awkwardness is symptomatic of the film's misdirected style.
Director Paul Lynch could have made a witty satire on the nature of proms or a frightening excursion into the terror of locker-lined hallways after dark. But, with the exception of one obvious cut from a bloody victim to the Hawaiian punch bowl, he's humorless and inadequate.
"Prom Night" certainly doesn't give you any moments to remember.
" HALLOWEEN " IS suffering from schizophrenia; it can't decide if it's a cult movie or simply a pedestrain box-office smash.
"It's probably a cult movie in reverse," concluded David Levy, owner of the Key Theater in Georgetown. "Cult movies are supposed to take time to build and this is simply too big to be a cult movie now. But it has a hardcore following of horror-film aficionados, who will still be there long after everyone else has died away."
" Halloween 's" problem is this: Although endowed with some unmistakable ingredients of a midnight classic, it has already grossed over $12 million since it was released last Halloween -- an obscene amount of lucre for any sefl respecting cult film to make in six months.
Made on less than $1 million, without one bankable star, " Halloween " has been on Variety's list of the 50 top grossing films in the country for the past 18 weeks.
To put this in perspective, the legendary "Night of the Living Dead," George Romero's schlock horror classic, grossed under $5 million during its two years on Variety's charts before its copyright problems became so byzantine that it fell into the public domain and beyond financial scrutiny. Anyone with a copy can now distribute it.
"Night of the Living Dead" has grossed millions since it opened in 1968, to be sure; it has been translated into 17 languages. But it has taken years and countless midnight shows to become a big moneymaker.
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacres," another gory film with a hardcore following, has grossed somewhere over $10 million in the five years since it was released and continues to make modest amounts at drive-ins and on late night television.
Enter John Carpenter and his no-name sleeper, " Halloween ." Watch him walk off with $123,000 during the first three days that it opened in the Boston area and $2 million in the Chicago-Milwaukee area alone in half a year.
Critics add to the conclusion by being hopelessly divided over the value of the film. But that in itself is good for sales. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker savaged " Halloween " in one of her reviews last month. But she directed her barbs at those nameless people who think that it has a cult potential. In effect, she acknowledged that it has something going for it, albeit repugnant to her.
"A lot of people seem to be convinced that ' Halloween ' is something special -- a classic" she wrote. "Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness -- when it isn't ashamed to revie the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic) -- it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do."
A prime target of Kael's wrath is Tom Allen of the Village Voice, who first discovered " Halloween " and wrote that "it stands alone in the past decade with George A. Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead' and, before that, with 'Psycho.'"
David Ansen of Newsweek, another " Halloween " fan, called it "one of the scariest flicks in years." "It's a classic grade-B movie with absolutely no pretensions," he concluded.
"You've got reviewers reacting to other reviewers, which is always a good sign," said Peter Kastoff, the man who orchestrates the distribution of " Halloween " for Compass International in Los Angeles.
It would appear that the American public likes the "dumb scariness" of " Halloween "; low-brow brutality has always fared well with audiences in this country. But combine a virtually no-name cast (Donald Pleasance does appear in it), timeless and simplistic terror with underwhelming acting and you're inviting the unswerving loyalty of horror devotees as well. " Halloween " appears to have captured both audiences.
Meanwhile Kastoff is running a piece that would make Anne Corio jealous. He eschews the saturation-distribution technique of "Jaws" that would splash " Halloween " all over billboards and theater marquees. While that route would be lucrative in the short run, he feels that it would lead " Halloween " to the pastures of late-night television long before its time. Instead, he is running the film sparingly and hopes to milk a little less for a lot longer. He assures us that we won't be seeing it one television for years to come.
After a brief, unspectacular opening last Halloween at a Broadway theater, Kastoff pulled the movie out of New York completely until late in the fall, when it reappeared at the Arty Eighth Street Playhouse along with that redoubtable cult film, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." After a two month run there, it was pulled again and will not be seen in New York at all until next Halloween , when it will reappear as part of a nationwide promotion.
"It could almost be a seasonal thing," Kastoff said. "We could run it every Halloween for a while and then pull it."
Kastoff operates on the less is more principle, which in this case, appears to be as good as gold. A little "dumb scariness" goes a long way. (ITEM 130) Picture, " Halloween ": $12 million in six months.
FILM: MORE TEENAGE MAYHEM IN ' SLEEPAWAY CAMP ' Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - January 23, 1984 Author: Rick Lyman, Inquirer Movie Critic
Dear Mom,
How are you? I am fine. I went to Sleepaway Camp this morning. My editor made me go. She's mean. I had to sit through the whole thing.
There were other people in the audience. I guess their editors made them go, too. Some of them yelled at the screen.
"Hey, man, this is traaaaaash," one shouted. "This is like some weird home movie," another screamed. "When we gonna get some action?" another pleaded.
Here is what happened to the people in Sleepaway Camp : One was stung to death by bees, one was drowned, one was boiled alive, three were hacked to death with a hatchet, one was shot in the throat with an arrow, one was beheaded and one was abused with a hot curling iron. In a flash of originality, one of them was stabbed to death in the shower.
Here is what happened to the people in the audience: nothing. I've had more thrills untangling paper clips. You want excitement, try to walk across Vine Street before the light changes.
I am told that the average cost of making a movie these days is $12 million. Sleepaway Camp looks as if it cost about, oh, 59 cents.
You've heard of the Actors' Studio? The people in this movie appear to have graduated from the Actors' Toolshed.
Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you about the three people who get run over by a motorboat. Eeeeeek. . . . WHAM! That's how the movie starts.
We flash ahead eight years. The lone survivor of that horrible boating accident is Angela, a shy and troubled teenager who goes off to Camp Arawak with her protective cousin, Ricky.
Everybody makes fun of Angela. Nyah, nyah! Why are you so shy, Angela? You sure act weird, Angela.
Pretty soon all the people who've been making fun of Angela turn up burned, bloated or hacked into julienne slices. Mel, who runs the place, keeps everything quiet because he's afraid that bad publicity will ruin the camp's reputation.
This makes about as much sense as anything else.
You'd think that the big question would be: Who's reponsible for these icky murders? There are plenty of suspects. It could be Ricky, protecting his shy cousin. Or it could be Angela, who's a little too quiet. Or it could be Mel, who looks a little too much like Milton Berle for his own good. Or the big- chested sexpot who torments Angela. Or the smart-aleck older boys who push Ricky around. Or Angela's sweet boyfriend, Paul.
But the even bigger question is: When will we get a daylight scene so I can look at my watch and see how much longer this thing is going to last?
I should warn you - in case your editor makes you go see it - that the people behind Sleepaway Camp seem to think that the climax is a real shocker. A big surprise. If you've been living in Sri Lanka for the last 20 years without television or newspapers, the ending might cause your right eyebrow to lift about one-tenth of an inch. No more.
The only good news is that there seem to be fewer and fewer of these teen- splatter movies, and they seem to make less and less money. That's good news because one more and I'm gonna be going away to summer camp. Either that or the funny farm.
SLEEPAWAY CAMP
Produced by Michele Tatosian and Jerry Silva, written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, music by Edward Bilous, and distributed by United Film Distribution Co.; running time, 1 hour, 19 mins.*
"Sleepaway Camp." A thriller starring Mike Kellin, Jonathan Tiersten and Felissa Rose. Written and directed by Robert Hiltzik. Photographed by Benjamin Davis. Edited by Ron Kalish and Sharyn L. Ross. Music by Edward Bilous. Running Time: 84 minutes. A United Film Distribution release. In area theaters.
* "Wavelength." A SciFi drama starring Robert Carradine, Cherie Currie and Keenan Wynn. Written and directed by Mike Gray. Photographed by Paul Goldsmith. Edited by Mark Goldblatt and Robert Leighton. Running Time: 87 minutes. A New World release. In area theaters.
Ring out the old year, ring in the new. Ring-a-ding-ding.
Well, folks, the annual glut of holiday movies finally has started to subside and we're back to grind, grind, grind.
Last week, we welcomed "Angel" and "Hot Dog - The Movie," not a very auspicious or promising start for the new film year. And this week, well, we have "Sleepaway Camp" and "Wavelength," examples of the poverty and pure gall of "contemporary moviemaking," or whatever.
A bloodied knife penetrating a child's sneaker figures prominently in the ads for "Sleepaway Camp." The ad reads: "You will go there in a bus . . . and come home in a box!"
Give me a break.
That's about as original as "Sleepaway Camp" ever gets. The plot is a replay of gory heebie-jeebies stirred in the "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" trilogies: White middle-class kids, all sexually promiscuous, get hacked to death by an unseen killer in sunny, meadowy settings.
And as is true with most movies of this ilk, "Sleepaway Camp" prompted the urban audience surrounding me to cheer on the killer and ridicule and scorn the ill-fated white kids.
The film's cast includes a lot of New York stage performers, apparently hard-up for movie work, and features one of the last screen performances of the late Mike Kellin, the gravel-voiced character actor who made a career largely playing ex-cons and sociopaths. His best film roles: the psycho convict in "The Great Imposter" and the sentimental tour guide (who remembers the food and service of every hospital he's ever been in) in ''Paternity."
Mike Kellin deserved a better send-off. We deserve better movies.
Another case in point is "Wavelength," a bit of misguided camp that marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Mike Gray ("The China Syndrome"). This el cheapo flick is the flipside to Steven Spielberg's "Close Entounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T.": Three alien creatures come to earth, hole up in the Hollywood Hills and prove to be not so very cute or benevolent. Neither is this movie.
The creatures are being held there against their will by a short-sighted U.S. Air Force that fails to see that the bald outer-space critters resemble some of Hollywood's lesser denizens. (If you doubt me, check out the aforementioned "Angel.")
It's feared that the aliens will do something awful to humans, like boggle them into a dazed state, but judging from the people on hand here (played by Robert Carradine and Cherie Currie, among others), it wouldn't make much difference. It might even be an improvement.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: "Sleepaway Camp" is rated R for its violence, and ''Wavelength" carries a PG for its language.
"Young Warriors." A drama starring James Van Patten, Anne Lockhart, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Roundtree and Lynda Day George. Directed by Lawrence D. Foldes from an original script by Foldes and Russell W. Colgin. Photographed by Mac Ahlberg. Edited by Ted Nicolaou. Music by Rob Walsh. Running Time: 103 minutes. A Cannon Films release. In area theaters.
"Mortuary." A thriller starring Mary McDonough, Christopher George and Lynda Day George. Directed by Howard Avedis from an original screenplay by Avedis and Marlene Schmidt. Photographed by Gary Graver. Edited by Stanford C. Allen. Music by John Cavacas. Running Time: 91 minutes. An Artists Releasing Corp. release. In area theaters.
This week's bottom-of-the-barrel movie entries - sleazoid flicks guaranteed to revolt any civilized moviegoer - cannibalize everything from "Death Wish" to "Pyscho." And for better or worse, they also provide us with a sort of mini Lynda Day George Film Festival.
In "Young Warriors," a young woman is gang-raped and murdered by a bunch of roughnecks. Her brother (James Van Patten) enlists the help of his fraternity buddies to hunt down the street scum.
While they're at it, they decide to root out other killers and, if possible, interrupt other street crimes in progress. Kevin - that's the boy's name - does all of this without the permission of his police-officer father (Ernest Borgnine) or his mother (Lynda Day George) who insists that skull- crashing is the job of the police.
Before long, Kevin and his chums are dressed in military camouflage uniforms and carrying weapons of all sorts as they stumble onto crimes and whip the daylights out of the subhumans committing them.
"Young Warriors" is a half-hearted, simple-minded tribute to vigilantism, telling us that violent sex and brutality are not nice, while wallowing in both. You'll need to empty out your brain cells to make any sense out of this kind of misguided logic.
In "Mortuary," a clone of Norman Bates - named Paul Andrews (and played by Bill Paxton) - is terrorizing Small Town, U.S.A. with the embalming fluid from his mortician-father's lab (workshop?). This unbalanced kid gets a kick out of extracting life juices from people while they're still warm.
Naturally, he comes from a bad home. His daddy (the late Christopher George in one of his last film roles) is heavily into black midnight chants, satanism and things that go bump in the night.
Like other films of this ilk ("Halloween," etc.), "Mortuary" finds true weirdness at the heart of Midwest normalcy. Its "suspense" revolves around Paxton's sick obsession with a sweet girl-next-door type (Mary McDonough of ''The Waltons") and around her deadly involvement with the father-son mortician team. Lynda Day plays the girl's mother, who may or may not be in on the weirdness.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: Both are rated R for language and violence.
"Possession." A thriller starring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill and Heinz Bennent. Directed and co-authored by Andrzej Zulawski from an original script by Frederic Tuten. Photographed by Bruno Nuytten. Music by Andrzej Korzynski. Special effects by Carlo Rambaldi. Running Time: 78 minutes (cut from original 128 minutes). A Limelight International release. In area theaters.
Any movie that has the gall to reach back to 1973 and attempt to redo "The Exorcist," whose own imperfections can be re-examined on TV these days, deserves every odious comparison it gets.
"Possession" is a boringly camp-elegante attempt by a group of reputable French, German and Polish filmmakers (most notably director Andrzej Zulawski) to find Art in the ooze and bile that monopolize most demonic-possession flicks. All we end up with is a movie that's even more fatuous than most exploitation thrillers of this ilk.
There's nothing on screen here that we haven't seen before. This is not to imply that "Possession" is without its interests or curiositites. Not so. The film's history alone should command our attention: "Possession" is - now get this - 50 minutes shorter than the version that played the Cannes Film Festival two years ago and won star Isabelle Adjani her Best Actress award there.
In the seriously truncated version being distributed in America, nothing makes sense, least of all Adjani's babbling, incoherent and yet arresting portrayal of a woman who has given birth to some slimy, other-worldly monster (which could be a demon or even a god).
Adjani's character, Anna, is a little unstable and more than a little bonkers. When she isn't abusing her little ballet students, she's carving up herself with an electric knife or terrorizing her wild-eyed husband (Sam Neill), who also seems possessed.
Anna keeps her repulsive monster-child stashed in a suite of rooms in a decaying hotel in Berlin. Amidst a flurry of flashbacks, flashforwards and scenes involving Anna's demure alter-ego (named Helen), our madwoman and her evil ward spend their days killing off nosy intruders (and sutffing their entrails in a refigerator) and their nights making . . . love. The lovemaking scenes in "Possession" are fairly gross.
I think it is safe to assume that the film's American distributor edited out everything except the excess and and frenzy. The missing 50 minutes most certainly contains exposition, common sense and an explanation or two, quiet, introspective scenes that might have brought rationale to the excess and frenzy (and perhaps even made them more vivid).
Adjani works herself up in a succession of self-abandoning scenes that seem to be a takeoff on her role in "The Story of Adele H," and Neill, always fascinating, remains the screen's most civilized psycho.
Complementing the stars - and also suffering from the indiscreet editing (garroting?) - are the contributions of cinematographer Bruno Nuytten and effects wizard Carol Rambaldi ("E.T." and "Alien").
Rarely has so much been so senselessly wasted.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: Rated R for its violence and gory effects. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: 'POSSESSION' IS A THRILLER ABOUT A LADY AND A CREATURE
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - November 15, 1983
Author: Rick Lyman, Inquirer Movie Critic
I sat through Possession because it's my job. Why anybody else would want to do it, I can't imagine. Take my word for it: If today's Inquirer does nothing more than steer you away from this movie, you will have gotten your quarter's worth.
Possession, in its present form, is one of those movies that's so awful, so unclean, that it clarifies for you exactly what it takes to make a movie bad. It's as if someone had taken every wrong technique and simmered them down into a thick, unpleasant broth.
Isabelle Adjani, the beautiful French actress who came to stardom with Francois Truffaut's Story of Adele H and has never, for my money, lived up to her hype, is humiliated in the lead role.
It's kind of hard to figure out what's happening most of the time, but she plays a crazed young woman with a thing for Jesus and another thing that she keeps in a run-down apartment house. This other thing, a gruesome sort of creature that she loves dearly and often, helps her knock off the curious souls who venture into their decaying refuge.
Ostensibly a thriller about demons, Possession is really an attempt to raise the gore movie to a level of pseudo art. There's plenty of spitting-up and contortions and people getting sliced and impaled, but there's also this moronic attempt to invest the images with an artsy weirdness. There are so many fisheye-lens shots that I thought I was at the aquarium.
But nothing is worse than Adjani's performance. She gurgles. She rants. Icky fluids comes out of her mouth. She screams her inane lines directly into the camera like a preschooler's idea of the way crazy people act.
And she won best actress honors at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. For this movie. It's unbelievable.
The original version of Possession, shown in Europe, was much longer. Perhaps her better scenes were left in the trash bin. Maybe they cut the movie in half and released the wrong part.
Suffice it to say that I don't think we're dealing with a lost masterpiece here. True, the movie is halfway hacked to shreds, but if they're looking for volunteers to finish the job they can add my name to the list.
There were a few unfortunates who went the distance the afternoon I saw the movie. It's a prodigious achievement and I salute them. But I'm not sure whether to give them a medal or a saliva test.
Maybe both. Just to be safe.
POSSESSION
Produced by Marie-Laure Reyre, written and directed by Andrzej Zulawski, photography by Bruno Nuytten, music by Andrzej Korzynski, and distributed by Limelight International Film Releases; running time, 1 hour, 18 mins. *
"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
