One Dark Night

One Dark Night (1983) has been sitting on my shelf for months, ever since I impulse-bought it along with Girls Nite Out (sic) and Blood Sisters as part of a bargain-bin box set of slashers titled “Bloody Schoolgirls Triple Feature.” Yesterday I finally got around to watching it, accompanied by some good friends and some good rum, and honestly we could have done worse.

This isn’t to say that One Dark Night has anything to actually recommend it, mind you. It’s a disposable early-’80s shocker about a dead telekinetic who launches corpses around a mausoleum, and the handful of “teenage” girls who are trapped inside with him because of a clique initiation prank gone wrong. (I put “teenage” in quotes because every actor in this movie has been out of high school for at least ten years, but that’s hardly unusual for the genre.) The skeleton-thin premise exists only as a place to hang the movie’s climactic set piece, the aforementioned reanimated corpses, which obviously took up most of the movie’s meager budget. The corpses themselves, though–and there are dozens of them–are well designed. Most of them are marionettes or dummies, not actors in makeup, which gave the designers a lot of freedom in creating bodies in various stages of decay. A soldier corpse interred with a wax face (that eventually falls off to reveal the damage underneath) was a particularly nice touch.

The writing and acting, on the whole, were both better than I expected. All of the actors are good enough to keep you in the movie, particularly the Final Girl played by Meg Tilly. Very few of the characters make stupid horror-movie mistakes, and some of them even demonstrate some survival skills. There are a few effective jump scares, a funny gag involving a flashlight, and a character with a habit of chewing on a toothbrush. All this, and none other than Adam West makes an appearance in a small role.

So do I suggest you watch this movie? In good conscience, no. But I’ve seen worse, and I’m sure you have, too.