Belatedly Wrapping Up Movies At Dog Farm IV In One Tidy Little Package . . .

The Thing (1982) - You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me, right?

       So how does one gauge the success or failure of a movie program?  Now that the Movies At Dog Farm live events have been around for a while, the success or failure of  these events must surely be relative.  Those of us that have attended from the start wax nostalgic about the best screenings from the past, though I wouldn't characterize any of the prior programs as complete and utter failures.  Additionally, I have to keep in mind that the movies are only one element of a larger event that's actually all about photography.  I'm just the geek show, eating light bulbs and biting the heads off chickens.  If I'm lucky, I get a receptive audience that responds to the show as I anticipated.  If not, well...

     As now seems to be tradition, Herb Miller and I made a trip to Timberville Friday night for beer, food, and cigarettes at roughly the same time the movies should have begun.  We were accompanied by Jai McWhorter, Phil's hired help at the Dog Farm who impressed me mightily be being only twenty years old and name dropping The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920) on me.  We were only about half way to Timberville when Herb's brake line busted unexpectedly, leaving us unable to make a sharp turn on a country road that then abruptly turned into a plowed field.  No one was hurt, and Herb got the car back on the road and continued on to Timberville sans brakes.  That seemed to make sense at the time.

The Manitou (1978) - The stunted glory of Misquamacas.

     We got back to the Dog Farm intact roughly an hour later, and no one was there except Phil, who was agitated that attendees who were expected earlier hadn't yet arrived.  Ultimately, everyone arrived safely in two separate carloads coming from different directions.  Tricia and Noodle Newnum arrived with event veteran Josh Kamikaze Buckland in tow, followed by Kelli and Jeff Ramirez shortly thereafter.  I think.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  Someone should have been keeping notes.  Our first movie, The Manitou (1978), finally lit up the screen just shy of midnight.  Sounds like everything's been a bit of a cluster fuck thus far, huh?

     Well I couldn't have asked for a more receptive audience.  There's something truly magical about watching a movie with an audience that's perfectly in tune with what's unfolding on the screen.  The Manitou is a movie that begs a lot of MS3TK style interaction, and that's exactly what happened.  Baggy back flesh and boob lasers carried the day.  Phil even treated us to an impersonation of the movie's vertically challenged Native American shaman afterwards.  We at the Dog Farm are nothing if not politically correct.

Alone In The Dark (1982) - Jack Palance saying howdy.

     Owing to how late we got started, we moved on to Alone In The Dark (1982) almost immediately after The Manitou was over.  No brakes, baby.  That seems to have been a theme for the evening.  Everyone was enthusiastic throughout the second feature, as well.  Night one of Movies At Dog Farm IV will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the events' more successful screenings.  We wrapped things up at about three in the morning, at which point I quickly left for home.

     Though other attendees came and went during the day Saturday, the audience for Saturday night's movies ended up being the exact same group of people as Friday night.  That's unusual.  Not at all bad, just unusual.  Generally there's a little more turnover from day to day.  Jeff was good enough to man the grill for us Saturday night, so the movies were improved greatly by the addition of hot dogs and hamburgers served up fresh. Up first for Saturday was Vanishing Point (1971), a movie I'd never seen and didn't select.  Herb had suggested it to me several months ago, so it took the place of the previously announced Rituals (1977).  Truth be told, I had begun to doubt that Rituals would play well to a crowd anyway.

Vanishing Point (1971) - Gratuitous nudity, 70s style.

     Turned out Vanishing Point was pretty damn good, though it didn't really lend itself to the same kind of audience interaction as the previous night's movies.  Still, it did possess the unmistakable vibe of vintage drive-in fodder.  I had threatened to lay the failure of the evening at Herb's feet if Vanishing Point didn't play well to the crowd, so I suppose I'm also obliged to give credit where it's due.  You might get to pick one again some day, Herb.

     Unfortunately, we lost a few viewers to an early bedtime before The Thing (1982) started.  It also began to get almost uncomfortably chilly outside, though that seemed weirdly apropos given The Thing's Antarctic setting.  Those of us that stuck it out enjoyed seeing The Thing on the big screen, but everyone quickly scuttled away to warmth immediately after the movie was over.

     So how does one gauge the success or failure of a movie program?  Relatively speaking, I'd say Movies At Dog Farm IV was a success.  The geek show was rewarded once again with the receptive audience it needs to survive.  The geek thanks you.

Alone In The Dark (1982) - Dr. Loomis, Grossberger, Howling Mad Murdock, The Sic F*cks, And Two Future Oscar Winners Still Just Paying The Bills

Alone In The Dark (1982)
Currently Out Of Print
Director:  Jack Sholder
Writer:  Jack Sholder, Robert Shaye, and Michael Harrpster
Stars:  Jack Palance, Donald Pleasance, Martin Landau, Dwight Schultz, Erland van Lidth, Deborah Hedwall, Lee Taylor-Allan, Phillip Clark, Elizabeth Ward, Brent Jennings, Gordon Watkins, and Carol Levy

A quartet of murderous psychopaths break out of a mental hospital during a power blackout and lay siege to their doctor's house.



     The movie Alone In The Dark (1982) bears no relation to the long running video game franchise of the same name.  It should not be confused with the godawful Uwe Boll directed movie adaptation of said video game, either.  Alone In The Dark is a splendid little gem of a movie that got lost in the deluge of slasher flicks flooding theaters in 1982, and it ended up largely forgotten outside of genre circles save for its status as one of the "clips no one can quite place" in the 1984 trailer compilation Terror In The Aisles.  It deserves better.

Byron 'Preacher' Sutcliffe (Martin Landau) approaches Mom's Diner in the surreal dream sequence preceding the opening credits of director Jack Sholder's 1982 directorial debut Alone In The Dark.

Preacher imagines Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasance) as a cleaver wielding short order cook who's about to help him split the tab the hard way...

...before he awakens from his nightmare to find himself back at the asylum and (you guessed it) alone in the dark!

     Alone In The Dark was among the first movies produced for Robert Shaye's New Line Cinema just a couple of years before the success of Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) turned it into The House That Freddy Built.  Shaye's wife Lynn even has a cameo as a receptionist at the Haven, the mental hospital run by the pot smoking Dr. Leo Bain, played by Donald Pleasance.  Pleasance is clearly having a blast in a role that comes across as a parody of his performance as the doom-and-gloom riddled Dr. Loomis in the Halloween franchise.  Dr. Bain subscribes to the notion that no-one is really crazy, that the people society labels as psychotics are only individuals having difficulty adapting to an already psychotic world.  Even the Haven's four most dangerous patients are given considerable free reign.  Paranoid schizophrenic Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), pyromaniac Byron 'Preacher' Sutcliffe (Martin Landau), hulking pedophile Ronald 'Fatty' Elster (Erland van Lidth), and a homicidal maniac called 'The Bleeder' (Phillip Clark) are contained only by an electric door lock that confines them to their own wing of the hospital at night.  It sure would be a shame if the power went out...

New hire Dr. Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) receives an awkwardly enthusiastic welcome from hospital administrator Leo Bain upon arriving for his first day of work at the Haven.

Dangerous mental patient and pedophile Ronald 'Fatty' Elster (Erland van Lidth) practices his origami, which one presumes must be a big hit with the kids.

De facto leader of  the psychos Colonel Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance) in a typically intense moment upon meeting Dr. Potter for the first time.

     As one might imagine, a considerable part of the charm of Alone In The Dark derives from its casting.  Beyond the delightful skewering of new age psychiatry that Pleasance provides, it's hard to deny the thrill of seeing future Oscar winners Jack Palance (Best Supporting Actor, City Slickers, 1991) and Martin Landau (Best Supporting Actor, Ed Wood, 1994) hamming it up to great effect as psychotics in a low budget horror movie.  The two also appeared together two years prior in the low budget sci-fi/horror flick Without Warning (1980), which was only recently rescued from obscurity by a new Scream Factory Blu-ray release.  Many viewers will also likely recognize the late Erland van Lidth, who portrays obese pedophile Ronald 'Fatty' Elster.  Van Lidth had previously made an impression as the hulking prison inmate Grossberger in the popular comedy Stir Crazy (1980), as well as later portraying the opera-singing stalker Dynamo in The Running Man (1987).  If that isn't enough star power to pique your interest, how about we also throw in actor Dwight Schultz as the mild-mannered - and completely sane - Dr. Dan Potter?  Ironically, just a few months later we'd all come to know Schultz primarily as crazed pilot 'Howling Mad' Murdock on the popular TV show The A-Team (1983-87).
 

The Sic F*cks perform Chop Up Your Mother just before a citywide blackout brings the show to a halt.

'Preacher' finds just exactly what he's looking for while looting during the blackout...

...as does 'The Bleeder' (Phillip Clark), who prefers to keep his identity a secret for now.

     Alone In The Dark was also Jack Sholder's directorial debut.  Sholder later worked with producer Robert Shay again on both A Nightmare On Elm Street 2:  Freddy's Revenge (1985) and the body-jumping alien parasite mini-classic The Hidden (1987) before spending most of the rest of his career working in television.  Contrary to what many fans believe, Sholder did not choose to have The Bleeder don a hockey mask upon escaping the Haven as any kind of homage to the Friday The 13th franchise.  Though released theatrically after the first appearance of Jason's iconic hockey mask in Friday The 13th Part III, Sholder's Alone In The Dark was completed first.  The character of The Bleeder was actually conceived by Shay, who was taken with the idea of a psychopathic killer who keeps his face hidden to facilitate a surprising reveal near the end of the movie.

Land Shark!  This screen grab is pretty funny once you know where 'Preacher' got the hat.

Of course, there's nothing funny about pedophilia - except maybe watching a wise-beyond-her-years little girl (Elizabeth Ward) effortlessly thwart a pedophile's A game while still scoring the cookies and milk.

     Owing largely to its release during the theatrical heyday of the slasher movie, Alone In The Dark is often lumped in with others of the type.  Though it bears obvious cosmetic similarities to the slasher sub-genre, it's ultimately more of a siege movie.  Alone In The Dark goes pretty light on the gratuitous gore, and most of the movie's most suspenseful moments come in the third act after Dr. Potter and his family have been trapped in their home by the trio of psychopaths lurking outside.  Slasher FX superstar Tom Savini does provide one make-up effect in the form of a briefly glimpsed zombie for a dream sequence, but his style of graphic slaughter is otherwise mostly absent.  There is a set piece involving a scantily clad babysitter named Bunky (Carol Levy) and a very big knife that most any slasher movie would be proud to call its own, but even that episode is nearly gore-free.  The appeal of Alone In The Dark, not surprisingly, lies mostly in the strength of its performances and its clever screenplay, two strengths rarely associated with the slasher sub-genre.

Meanwhile, Bunky the babysitter (Carol Levy) thinks there may be someone under the bed...

...and there is...

...so maybe it's time for Bunky to get the hell off the bed and consider a less dangerous vocation.

     I intentionally went with relatively few screen caps from the final siege of the Potter household in Alone In The Dark so as not to ruin any of the shocks, and I hope I've been sufficiently vague throughout this post about the specifics of the narrative.  Alone In The Dark is unique amongst horror movies of the era, and it deserves to be seen with its surprises intact.  The original DVD release from Image Entertainment is unfortunately long out of print, though it can still be had for a price.  Alone In The Dark also later appeared in a two disc, four movie Image release alongside Afraid Of The Dark (1991), Relentless 3 (1993), and Relentless 4 (1994), though that release seems to be even harder to track down.  Sadly, it doesn't seem to be currently available on any of the major VOD outlets.  Rumor has it that a high definition master of the movie still exists, so perhaps Scream Factory will someday swoop in to save Alone In The Dark from obscurity just as they did with the previously mentioned Without Warning.

Dr. Potter and his family prepare to fend off a home invasion...

... because appearances notwithstanding...

...the Potters already know they're not alone in the dark tonight.

     So how, you may ask, might someone go about seeing Alone In The Dark given its current state of release?  Well, if you expect to be anywhere near Timberville, Virginia on Memorial Day Weekend, shoot me an email.  Alone In The Dark is the second confirmed title - alongside the previously announced Rituals (1977) - for the Movies At Dog Farm IV live event this Spring!