Review: One Dark Night (1983)

Directed by: Tom McLoughlin
Starring: Meg Tilly, Melissa Newman, E.G. Daily
Written by: Michael Hawes, Tom McLoughlin
Music by: Bob Summers
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Code Red)
IMDb

The debut feature from director/co-writer Tom McLoughlin, best known for Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives, is a spooky little joint that’s sort of two stories in one: there’s a telekinetic warlock-type dude who can raise the dead (and his daughter dealing with the aftermath of his dark mischief after he turns up dead) and then there’s a popular teen girl who’s dared to spend the night in a mausoleum as initiation into a clique. This mausoleum looks a whole lot like the one from Phantasm (1979), but I was unable to confirm they’re the same. The first hour of this movie, when all of the characters are being established, is kind of a drag. But E.G. Daily pops up in an early role, and that’s a nice thing. There’s also Adam West! Yes, Batman! But his role is entirely inconsequential, even though he often gets top billing, and his casting was supposedly purely out of pity over how much the Caped Crusader had destroyed his career. It takes entirely too long for the two narrative threads here to intertwine and when they do, it’s coincidentally, since the mausoleum the girls choose for their initiation is the same one in which the necromancer was laid to rest. The first couple of acts, and the general propulsion of the story, would have been amped up if some of the eerie occurrences plagued the teen cast earlier on, to portend the corpse-laden doom to come. But regardless, none of the characters are especially obnoxious and the warlock’s backstory is intriguing, so it’s not too laborious to get to the climax — which kind of rocks. Once things go full-on creepy in the mausoleum, there’s a lot to love. The last third is an ecstatic amalgam of nifty special effects, featuring pretty convincing corpses (the design of which apparently used actual human skeletons) dripping a lot of gloop; chilling music that tingles the spine; flourishes of light and color, specifically purple and pink; and many, many shots of light emitting from a cracking mausoleum wall and the warlock, looking so much like a stoned John Carpenter, eyes ablaze with electricity. There was an interesting choice made by the effects crew to use largely immobile mannequins for the warlock and all of the reanimated corpses. On one hand, this really detracts from any potential realism, but on the other hand, the way the cadavers slowly, borderline inertly, slide-slash-levitate towards their victims is damn creepy and nightmarish. I wasn’t much of a fan of One Dark Night the first time I saw it. I guess I was expecting something cheesier and more typical of a zombie film. But I’ve grown to appreciate this surreal visual and auditory mood experiment.

Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10