One Dark Night (1982) – Review

If I learned one thing from watching 80s horror movies is that pulling a prank will most likely result in a bunch of dead teenagers.  This is a cinematic trope that writer/director Tom McLoughlin embraced with his movie One Dark Night, an entry that pits a “Final Girl” against an army of the dead.

The movie centres around a young woman named Julie Wells (Meg Tilly) who is sick of being considered “boring” by her peers and to change this she decides to join a club entitled The Sisters, which consists of three snobby high school girls named Carol (Robin Evans), Leslie (Elizabeth Daily) and Kitty (Leslie Speights). Unfortunately, Carol is the ex-girlfriend of Julie’s new boyfriend, Steve (David Mason Daniels), and her jealousy leads her to use a local mausoleum as part of the hazing ritual. Can we guess how long it takes anyone to realize that the mausoleum is not just a spooky old building but a place where supernatural forces are at work?

“I hope we aren’t buried alive under a ton of re-animated corpses.”

The villain of this piece is a famed Russian occultist named Karl Raymarseivich Raymar, who at the beginning of the film is found dead in an apartment building along with six “murdered” girls. After Raymar’s funeral, his estranged daughter Olivia McKenna (Melissa Newman) and her husband Allan (Adam West) are approached by an occult journalist Samuel Dockstader (Donald Hotton) who explains to the couple that Olivia’s father was a psychic vampire who gained great telekinetic powers by kidnapping young girls, terrorizing them and feeding off the bio-energy they produced via their increased adrenaline because, you know, that’s a thing. Of course, Raymar was interred in the very mausoleum where our protagonist will be spending the night.

“I hope no evil necromancer tries to suck out my life energy.”

Stray Observations:

• If a corpse at a crime scene discharged a jolt of electricity, a blast strong enough that it punched a hole in the ceiling, I’d wait for a hazmat team before I touched anything else.
• This film’s Mean Girls wear purple satin jackets emblazoned with the word “Sisters” on the back as if they are trying to be an 80s version of the “Pink Ladies” from Grease.
• Tracking shots through the marble corridors of a mausoleum gave off a certain Phantasm vibe to it and this film came out only a couple of years after Don Coscarelli’s classic was released.
• As was the case for Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, the filmmakers used actual skeletons that were imported from India to have as props for this production.

As exports go, this is definitely a creepy one.

Hats off to Meg Tilly who gives a standout performance as Julie, a student who is initially skeptical of the supernatural occurrences but is able to quickly come to grips with the horrifying reality of these terrifying events. Fans of Adam West will also be happy as he delivers a solid performance in what could have been a rather thankless role as the doubting husband. And a nice round of applause should go to director Tom McLoughlin for not letting the stigma of Adam West’s campy persona as Batman from preventing him from casting him in this flick. West is given a few nice moments with co-star Melissa Newman, who herself comes across more as a crazed deus ex machina than a fully-fledged character.

Which one of these two will develop superpowers?

The movie does an excellent job of building tension with its claustrophobic setting of the mausoleum, creating an eerie atmosphere of dread, which is built up through the use of moody lighting, chilling sound effects and a haunting musical score, and this is what keeps the viewer on edge as McLoughlin attempts to build tension and suspense to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats. This is all aided by well-crafted special effects team and makeup artists who create a world of dread and horror, not to mention the film’s primary villain, a telekinetic corpse, which is particularly unsettling.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mister DeMille.”

Where One Dark Night fails is in its pacing, the plot unfolds like molasses in January and despite the interesting subject matter, a telekinetic psychic vampire, the actual horror element doesn’t kick into gear until we are well past the hour mark, which isn’t good when your film clocks in at just under 90-minutes, and the stuff we are stuck watching prior to this point isn’t all that interesting, seeing Julie’s boyfriend tooling around town on his motorbike look for her is less than gripping, but when the last act finally does arrive it almost makes up for that long wait, well, almost.

Note: I hope you like this shot of Raymar’s cracked and glowing vault because we get to see it about a billion times throughout this film’s short running time.

Overall, One Dark Night is a well-crafted if sorely paced horror film, one that delivers plenty of scares and suspenseful moments, even if it takes a little too much time to get to the point, and unlike many of its contemporaries it is not overly gory and only gives us a little “side boob” in the nudity department, and while the structure may be a little thin it is still a well-constructed flick with acting is solid throughout, so if you’re a fan of classic 80s horror movies, then One Dark Night is definitely worth checking out.