“One Dark Night” was the directorial debut of Tom McLoughlin. The director is perhaps most famous for providing one of the best Jason Voorheese movies, “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives” (1986). The screenplay was put together by McLoughlin and Michael Hawes. The pair had been trying to sell the script for about four years before they found a group of investors will to put up one million dollars for the film providing they start filming within three weeks.
The movie stars Meg Tilly as “Julie” a young girl determined to prove herself above a group of college mean girls by passing their initiation into their club called “The Sisters”. The club is led by “Carol” (Robin Evans) who holds a grudge against Julie since she is now going out with Carol’s ex boyfriend Steve (David Mason Daniels). Carol tasks Julie with spending a night in a mausoleum, but intends to make be make it as uncomfortable as possible for her. Unfortunately for the girls the mausoleum currently houses occultist Karl Raymarseivich Raymar, rumoured to be a psychic vampire with the powers of telekinesis. The only person aware of the danger they are in is Raymar’s daughter Olivia (Melissa Newman), but can she save them?
Pranks and Perils
As with a lot of horrors of the early 80’s, this is actually fairly slow to start. Things don’t actually kick off until the last 30 minutes and the rest of the film is pure set up. This is an approach that can work very well and can certainly cover for a lower effects budget, but it does ask more from the actors and script to make it work. If you are killing teenagers in the first ten minutes you have your entertainment factor. If you aren’t getting dirty until the final act you need to keep the audience entertained via other means. One Dark Night takes a two pronged approach to this. We have a story with college teenagers playing cruel pranks and walking blindly into the hands of the movies antagonist. But we also have Olivia, the antagonists estranged daughter learning via audiotape just what her father was capable of.
First thing I have to say here is I quite like exposition via audio tape in a horror. It works and doesn’t feel as awkward as having a character turn up mid way through to do a big exposition dump. Indeed, because it’s one sided and not a conversation it cuts the time needed for exposition right down. Of course you can’t do that in every film, but it works here. This exposition is spread out a bit as we see the events develop with the rest of the cast. The plot design here is pretty solid, the only downside is none of these characters are interesting. The antagonist, Raymar, is silent and sort of dead. The generic final girl is basically useless, her boyfriend is brave but also useless and her bullies are generic bullies. Well outside of one girls weird thing with her comfort toothbrush.
The Final Act
When it comes to events kicking off in the final act we have a lot of zombie like creatures, but because they are animated via telekinesis instead of being actual zombies they just sort of float into people instead of attacking them. Raymar is mostly motionless but occasionally fires out bolts of electricity at people. Ultimately it’s kind of goofy. But it is a pretty original idea. I’m not sure I’ve seen zombies created through telekinesis before. Maybe skeletons, but not flesh covered zombies. It occurs to me that saving these zombies until the final act was probably a good idea. The long build up and relatively brief time they are around for means they just about get away with it. Only narrowly though.
Ultimately this a pretty average 80’s horror with some interesting ideas that don’t quite work out in practice. The zombies look pretty good even if they move in a goofy way. Adam West feels wasted. The characters are generic, but the plot itself is fairly solid. A mixed bad that averages out to a 5.5/10. If you are a fan of 80’s horror it’s worth checking out, if not skip it!
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