valhalla7 s
The Dark is what you get when you cross the worst parts of a private eye and killer on the loose movie, tack on some sci-fi tropes, and add the worst lighting and photography imaginable. It is a mangled non sequitur of a movie, shambling along lifelessly until its utterly bonkers conclusion, made all the more incomprehensible by the fact that you can barely see a darned thing.
The plot, such as it is, is that some kind of creature is stalking the streets of LA and brutally murdering one victim every night, usually by ripping their head clean off. In the original script, the monster was supposed to be a zombie, but since science fiction was the hottest thing in late 70s cinema, they changed it to an alien at the last moment. As a result, the police and the press still frequently call it a zombie, and it acts a lot like one, only rising at night and ripping people apart for no reason.
But since it's now an alien, it also shoots poorly drawn lasers from its eyes, causing people to explode in massive fireballs that were clearly added hastily in post-production. And, in keeping with the sci-fi theme, there's some incredibly ham-fisted opening and closing narration about man's place in the universe and the dangers which lurk beyond our sight as we blindly grope our way through the dark (get it?) all of which would have felt dated in 1959, much less '79.
Anyway, while the creature kills people, the cops trade theories and yell at it each other about how they have to find the killer, a local TV station breathlessly reports on every killing, and the whole city goes nuts over one murder a night, which I'm reasonable sure is well below LA's normal murder rate. Meanwhile, the father of the first victim, who is apparently a novelist and budding detective, does some investigating of his own, which mostly consists of crawling the bars and asking people if they've seen anything, while hitting on any vaguely pretty girls.
He's honestly kind of a creeper, and we're hardly surprised when the cops finger him as a likely suspect early on. He's not much of a detective either, but at least he gets farther than the cops by enlisting the aid of an elderly psychic, who tells him who the monster's next victim will be. He's joined by a pretty young reporter, and occasionally a police detective, but none of their efforts really go anywhere, and it's really more by coincidence than anything else that they eventually find the monster.
Kasey Kasem also makes an inexplicable appearance as a crotchety old police pathologist, and the sight of him trying to club the monster to death with a piece of scrap lumber provides the movie's one real bright spot. This happens during the massive, chaotic, incredibly poorly staged shootout at the film's climax, complete with one of the most ludicrous endings I have ever witnessed. It's like the director just told everyone to run around and keep firing. It's really that nuts.
This is a very incompetent movie all around, and it's hard to point to any one thing and say with any certainty "this is the worst part." That said, what's worse than the slow pacing, lack of likeable characters, or lazy directing, and maybe worse than the jumbled storytelling and atrocious special effects that resulted from the last-minute zombie/alien switch, is the unbelievably incompetent cinematography. I have never seen a movie that was shot this badly, and part of me suspects I never will again. Most of this movie takes place at night, but absolutely no-one involved in this production had any idea how to properly light a night scene. Heck, I'm not sure they even tried.
As a result, large portions of this movie are so poorly lit that you can't tell what's supposed to be happening. The monster attack scenes are particularly bad in this regard, which may be intentional given the rather pathetic state of the monster itself, which is clearly wearing blue jeans and a jacket in most of its appearances. But the nighttime driving, bar crawling, and other street scenes are hardly any better. Maybe the filmmakers didn't have the budget for lighting rigs. Or maybe they thought that LA's countless street lights and neon signs would provide enough light to work with. If so, they were very wrong. Apparently, none of them had heard of day for night shooting either.
So we're left with a jumbled, sometimes literally unwatchable mess of a movie that will bore you for most of its runtime, then leave you wondering what the hell you just watched. Even with its low budget, low ambitions, and the general lack of talent involved, it should have been better than this. If there's a lesson to this debacle, it's that you should never re-write a movie that's already shooting. And just because a movie is called the Dark, that doesn't mean the whole thing should be so dark that audiences are staring at a black screen.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
This movie is about a tall humanoid alien who is on Earth for unspecified reasons and kills random people at night.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
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Audience Member
Characterised by slow, suspenseless stalk sequences, low quality lighting and a lot of standing around shouting "we must catch The Mangler!", Stanford Whitmore's beige slasher flick is a cinematic atrocity.
When he actually makes it on screen, our enigmatic Mangler is a laser-beam-eyed B-Movie badass but, for the most part, The Dark is a movie of maximum moaning and minimum mangling. It's as if Whitmore and co. are unsure whether they want this to be a horror movie or a detective drama.
The editing's all over the place, the lighting's almost as dull as the lead characters and the plot (or lack of) is literally incomprehensible. Highlights include a random car chase and sincere police officials discussing the possibility that the traceless, fingerprint-free Mangler might be a zombie.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
02/14/23
Full Review
Audience Member
If they got rid of those stupid eyeball laser beams this would have been a decent cult classic. The make up of the creatures were ahead of their time back in 1979 for low budget monster effects. I also think this was the final nail in killing William Devane's film career...even though I personally like Bad News Bears In Breaking Training with him in it, I hear alot of people talk shit about it. They mostly don't like him in it, even though I felt did he did a good enough job with the role he was given...which in the end wasn't much. The 1979 movie the Dark however is a steaming pile of shit and he should have turned it down but at that point probably didn't have much he could have said no to.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
The synopsis says that this movie is well acted, but I disagree, the actors were boring. In fact the whole movie wasn't exciting enough to hold my attention. The monster was even boring. There are murders, there's a monster, there's cops trying to stop the monster, and that's it. This is a poor excuse for a monster film. It doesn't make anyone afraid of the dark.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
If they got rid of those stupid eyeball laser beams this would have been a decent cult classic. The make up of the creatures were ahead of their time back in 1979 for low budget monster effects. I also think this was the final nail in killing William Devane's film career...even though I personally like Bad News Bears In Breaking Training with him in it, I hear alot of people talk shit about it. They mostly don't like him in it, even though I felt did he did a good enough job with the role he was given...which in the end wasn't much. The 1979 movie the Dark however is a steaming pile of shit and he should have turned it down but at that point probably didn't have much he could have said no to.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
Full Review
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