SEASON 6
1982 was such a peak year they made a documentary about its cinematic wares. I've got a future post coming up about that year. I've alluded to it before, but I'll get there.
That year was probably the apex of a genre that would go on for many more years. Alone in the Dark probably wedges into it sideways. There's no way in this day and age that a small indy studio could wedge the likes of Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau, Jack Palance and oh yeah, Dwight Schulz into a horror cheapie like New Line was able to here. And the film works despite the odds against it. Despite its cast and the effectiveness thereof, (no one phoned it in here, kudos to director Jack Sholder) its largely gone forgotten with the exception of a Scream Factory blu ray release.
Pleasence runs a mental health facility with the style of the combination of a hippy love goon straight from the streets of Haight-Asbury and a potential patient himself. His lack of respect for the dangerousness of the guys on the 3rd floor and dependence on electricity to keep them reigned in leads to the obvious when a two-day electrical blackout occurs. Needless to say, our scary guys led by brick-house Jack Palance (who stayed that way until he passed away) and including Landau, looking a lot like a shark here, and a couple other psychotic chaps (Oops! Let's not call them by that cold linguistic label. Dr. Pleasence prefers to refer to them as "voyagers". Yeah, let's go with that.)
All of this comes together nicely, performed well by everyone. A surprisingly sharp turn by the actual protagonist, Schulz, is key here. Some actual intentional laugh-out-loud flashes in the story, and that adds to the intrigue surprisingly well. The script, penned by Sholder himself, is actually tight if tough to believe. But this is an early 80's low-budget flick and credit must be given to the whole piece as a success.
If you're looking for something off the beaten path this Halloween, you can probably do worse.
Oh yeah, and a nice performance by the era's New York pseudo-punk outfit, The Sic F*cks.
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