Given that John “Bud” Cardos took over directorial chores three or four days into shooting after original director Tobe Hooper proved woefully out of his league handling a full-scale production crew, “The Dark” definitely isn’t the wretched, foul-smelling unmitigated stinker it’s often derisively written off as being. Granted, this modest sci-fi\/horror tale of a pernicious extraterrestrial decapitating several Los Angeles residents (the first victim is played by none other than Paris Hilton’s real life mom Kathy Richards!) does suffer from a rather slow, meandering pace, a few dreary lulls in the action, choppy editing which frequently borders on confounding, and a muddled script (the alien angle was tossed in at the last minute; the beast was originally supposed to be a flesh-eating zombie), but otherwise it’s technically sound. Cardos manages to create a reasonable amount of tension, stages the kill scenes with laudable restraint, and really delivers with the excitingly over-the-top grand payoff ending, a fiery, all-hell’s-broken-loose, packs one hell of a bunch final face-off in which the rot-faced intergalactic ghoul turns many of L.A.’s finest pigs into smoking strips of crisp bacon by shooting laser beams from its eyes. John Morrill’s cinematography gives the film a slick, attractive look which successfully bellies the movie’s low budget (Lee Frost was an assistant cameraman), making especially impressive use of dissolves and super-impositions. Roger Kellaway’s first-rate freaky score also warrants appraisal, boasting an odd, eerie, unintelligible ghostly whispering vocal (“the daaa-rrk!”) that takes on a truly unnerving black mass-like incantatory quality.<\/p>\n
The superior B-movie cast rates as another significant plus. The always strong and commanding William (“Rolling Thunder,” “Red Alert”) Devane as an ex-con turned best-selling crime novelist who’s obsessed with catching the alien after it butchers his only daughter, Richard Jaeckel as the rugged, hard-nosed cop on the case, Jacqueline Hyde as an eccentric old gypsy fortune teller, and Keenan Wynn as a gruff, but fair television station manager all contribute excellent performances. Appearing in nifty bits are Vivian (“Parasite”) Blaine as a haughty jet-setter, biker film vet Gary Littlejohn cunningly cast against type as a police officer, and a pre-“Miami Vice” Phillip Michael Thomas as a belligerent gang leader. The massive, shambling John Bloom, a bulky, imposing hulk of man who played the monster in Al Adamson’s “Dracula Vs. Frakenstein” and the retarded guy in “The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant,” makes for a marvelously menacing murderous fiend. Even the novel casting of pint-sized Top 40 disc jockey Casey Kasem as a pathologist works surprisingly well, mainly because Kasem himself plays his minor part commendably straight. Only Cathy Lee Crosby as a crusading up-and-coming female TV reporter who wants to prove herself to her skeptical sexist pig male colleagues disappoints, proving once and for all that she’s more of a pretty face than a genuine actress. Overall, this unjustly maligned movie ain’t half bad.<\/p>\n
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Given that John “Bud” Cardos took over directorial chores three or four days into shooting after original director Tobe Hooper proved woefully out of his league handling a full-scale production crew, “The Dark” definitely isn’t the wretched, foul-smelling unmitigated stinker it’s often derisively written off as being. Granted, this modest sci-fi\/horror tale of a pernicious…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23250,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movie-news","wpcat-1-id"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",717,1080,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies-145x145.jpg",145,145,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies-199x300.jpg",199,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",717,1080,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies-680x1024.jpg",680,1024,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",717,1080,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",717,1080,false],"gridflex-1422w-autoh-image":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",717,1080,false],"gridflex-1074w-autoh-image":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",717,1080,false],"gridflex-360w-300h-image":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies.jpg",199,300,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"admin1","author_link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Given that John “Bud” Cardos took over directorial chores three or four days into shooting after original director Tobe Hooper proved woefully out of his league handling a full-scale production crew, “The Dark” definitely isn’t the wretched, foul-smelling unmitigated stinker it’s often derisively written off as being. Granted, this modest sci-fi\/horror tale of a pernicious...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/c1e8280d2619fb5a1d43c3e2e8777679-horror-movie-posters-horror-movies-199x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n