Alone in the Dark

Here’s a horror film that can’t decide what it wants to be. It wants to be scary. It wants to be funny. It wants to say something profound about madness and sanity. It ends up being none of these things consistently, though it has its moments.

The setup is pure B-movie gold: four psychos escape from a mental hospital during a blackout and lay siege to their new doctor’s suburban home. The cast is even better. Jack Palance broods with menace. Martin Landau grins like a jack-o’-lantern and sets things on fire. Donald Pleasence plays the hospital chief as if he’s only slightly less insane than his patients. They’re having a ball.

Landau steals the picture. He knows exactly what kind of movie this should be. His “Preacher” is all manic energy and toothy smiles, a pyromaniac who could have walked out of a cartoon. There’s a scene where he and Palance, driving a van, stalk a mailman on a bicycle. It ends with a death that made me laugh, though I’m not sure director Jack Sholder intended that response.

And that’s the problem. Sholder, making his debut, wants his cake and to eat it too. In one scene we get Palance delivering the wonderfully absurd line, “There are no crazy people, doctor, we’re all just on vacation.” In another, we get a child molester alone with a little girl, insisting they go upstairs to her room. You can’t mix that kind of genuine darkness with camp and expect it to work.

At least the film looks good. The New Jersey locations are atmospheric. The night photography is first-rate. But the characters are fatally underwritten. Every woman in the movie freezes when confronted with danger. One can’t even climb stairs. Meanwhile, our hero—played by Dwight Schultz—refuses weapons and makes one boneheaded decision after another. By the time the finale rolls around, you stop caring whether they live or die. In a surprise given the adults’ listless performances, the family’s tween daughter proves the most engaging, displaying a maturity beyond her years without seeming cloying.

Then there are the plot holes. The inmates escape because a blackout knocks out the electronic locks. Fine. But what about backup generators? Don’t maximum security facilities have redundant systems? We get one throwaway line about the auxiliary generator failing. That’s lazy.

The blackout also triggers instant citywide riots. Within what feels like minutes, downtown is ablaze with looters. This is clearly just an excuse to get the inmates weapons and new clothes. More lazy writing.

The finale stretches credibility to the breaking point. Someone feels the basement door and detects a fire below. Our hero agrees, grabs a fire extinguisher, and heads down—turning multiple corners before he finally encounters a small blaze. How could they have felt heat from such a tiny fire so far away? Don’t ask.

Still, I can’t quite hate this movie. Landau and company are too much fun. The film has ambition, even if it can’t follow through. As New Line Cinema’s first horror production, it’s a curiosity. Studio head Bob Shaye clearly saw something in Sholder, giving him the reins to A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 a few years later.

That said, Alone in the Dark is a missed opportunity. A film that fully embraced its “Grumpy Old Psychos” premise might have been a minor classic. Instead, we get a well-photographed muddle that hints at better movies it could have been.

Trivia note: One of the inmates dons a hockey mask during a sporting goods store break-in. This was released the same year as Friday the 13th Part 3, which introduced Jason’s iconic mask. Great minds think alike.

Or something.