11/13/06: Alone In The Dark (1982)Sorry about skipping a Veteran's Day entry in favor of
Borat. We might as well be a Google search page. But if you think that's bad, you should see how we've conned little J.R. jr. into thinking that the parade on November 11th is held in honor of his birthday.
Anyway, we felt worse after Jack Palance died. The first two obituaries we read didn't list his military service. We finally saw one on Saturday that mentioned Palance's training as a B-24 pilot, but even that skipped the fun fact about the cockpit fire that gave the character actor such a distinctive look.
Palance would go on to an impressive filmography of conservative films, so let's honor him today with
Alone In The Dark. It's been a whole week since we did a horror movie, and nearly that long since we mentioned Martin Landau.
Alone In The Dark came out amongst a glut of slasher films. Writer/director Jack Sholder, however, was determined to improve on the genre. He starts with the believable premise that psychiatrists are crazier than their patients. In fact, newly hired shrink Dr. Potter (Dwight Schultz) arrives to find that the inmates--if not running the asylum--are certainly handling the phones there.
Donald Pleasance is nicely batty as Dr. Bain, who thinks it's perfectly okay to let a mental patient sit in as his receptionist. The hug-happy hippie isn't judgmental in other ways, either. For example, Bain doesn't believe in oppressive things like prison bars. His psychiatric hospital--reassuringly called The Haven--houses four homicidal maniacs (or, as Bain describes them, "voyagers") who are safely contained via electrical locks.
So, naturally, there's a power outage that lets the psychos go for a stroll.
Palance and Landau are in fine shameless form as, respectively, Colonel Hawke and arsonist Preacher Sutliff. Imagine all the liberal idiocy you could get with a film where two of the killers are a former POW and a Christian fanatic. Then enjoy the fun as Sholder scripts an imaginative tale of how Potter has to defend his family once the psychos decide that their new doc has killed their old doc.
There are a few horror clichés, but Sholder avoids lazy tricks such as excessively terrorizing women. It's kind of unfair that the above image would go on to define the movie. Our new-wave heroine even learns an important lesson about the perils of attending rallies against nuclear power. And as much as Pleasance comes across as a Leftist nutcase, the film ends on a horrifically fatalistic note that suggests maybe it really is time to--well, vote Democrat or stay at home or whatever you people did last Tuesday.
Make it your own: It took a while, but
Alone In The Dark finally made it to
DVD with plenty of extras--including a commentary by Sholder that salutes Palance's demanding ways. Sholder didn't go on to the career he should have, but he can at least claim to have helped launch the empire that became New Line Cinema.
And to our fellow horror fans: Yes, we know Sholder was likely inspired by an obscure British import, and we'll cover that one by next Halloween.
