THE DARK

d. John Cardos (1979)

The original storyline for The Dark was fairly straightforward: an abused child is held prisoner in an attic until he reaches adulthood. When a house fire kills his abusers and sets him free he heads to the city and, completely unhinged, begins a brutal killing spree, averaging a murder a night and earning the nickname ‘The Mangler’. With the death count rising, it’s up to the Police, an investigative journalist, the father of a murdered girl and an eccentric psychic to find The Mangler and stop him in his tracks. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, but it works. Halfway through filming, having already fired director Tobe Hooper, the producers decided that aliens were the big thing, so The Mangler should be an alien, effectively throwing the film against the wall and letting it slide ignobly to the ground, bloodied and bent out of shape.

The alien looks like a werewolf or a make-up free Gene Simmons in a lumberjack outfit, a huge shambling thing with grey, putrid flesh. It possesses enormous strength, is impervious to bullets* and can fire lasers from its eyes, and, believe me, it fires lasers from its eyes a lot. It doesn’t like being set fire to but then, to be honest, who does?  In the end analysis, it’s an extremely crappy thing to ruin a film for, and what remains is a mass of non-sequiturs and undeveloped detail, with promising characters and situations cut off and cauterised in favour of expedient gimmickry that doesn’t make any kind of dramatic or cinematic sense.

As a final insult, the producers bookend the ruin with bullshit, firstly with a caption which pontificates about the certainty of life on other planets and that, like some nasty earth creatures, aliens might prove to be aggressive and deadly to man and, finally, with a concluding narration in a gravelly voice which states 'it was an encounter that has no explanation or understanding', i.e. 'Fuck knows what happened there. Right, see you later’. It’s extremely unsatisfactory, especially as it wastes a decent cast, a good cinematographer, Panavision, a $2m dollar budget and an unusual and interesting score** – this isn’t shoestring or amateur film-making, it’s just what happens when artless, greedy people are calling the shots.

*  I can understand how aliens might not be killed by a bullet, but this creature is literally shot a thousand times in the course of the final ten minutes. It’s clearly organic, so, at the very least,  wouldn’t bits of his body be torn apart, or severed? If nothing else, Wouldn’t the sheer weight of the bullets slow him down?

** In moments of tension, the soundtrack has a sibilant, insistent voice whispering ‘the dark-nessssssssssssss’.