Ha ha, eh? It’s Burl here with a little
Canadian horror, a movie so Toronto it includes “The Taco Bell at King &
Dufferin” in its special thanks at the end! It’s a monster picture called The Dark! (And no, it's not that The Dark!) Believe it or not I saw
this one not just in the theatre, but on a double bill with another low-budget
Canadian horror movie, The Club! That
one is so Toronto it was shot in Casa Loma! You don’t get much more concentrated
Hogtown than that, except maybe Highpoint,
where the guy falls off the CN Tower! Ha ha!
But these two works of dubious cultural
benefit were probably the last real B movies I saw in a first-run house! I’d
seen many before, like Time Walker
and Witchboard and The First Power, but after this, cheap
monster movies like The Dark went
right to video! That’s sort of their natural home, but there’s no substitute
for seeing something on the big screen with an audience to laugh and gasp with!
Well, the movie theatres will be back! In the meantime we'll talk about The Dark, which begins with Brion James, the
movie’s American star, familiar from Blade Runner and The Horror Show,
playing a cop and running through a graveyard with his partner! But the partner
gets the claw, and meanwhile, who’s that slumped against a gravestone guzzling
booze from a paper bag? It’s no mere hobo, but our male lead, Stephen McHattie,
whom we know so well from Death Valley
and Moving Violation! He’s Hunter,
or maybe Gary, and after tangling with a big rodent creature, he’s shot by
James’ angry-cop character! But slime from the giant rat makes him better or
something! Then James takes him down to the station house and puts a pounding
on him!
Well, soon enough it’s several years later,
and McHattie, who, as it turns out, is a motorcycle jacket scientist of some kind, has, ever since
his graveyard encounter, been tracking the rat creature in an attempt to
capture it alive and harness its restorative powers for the good of mankind!
James in the intervening years has become crazed with a desire for blood
vengeance and a strong need to kill the thing that clawed his partner! As in Silent Rage, there’s a wandering motorcycle gang causing second-string
trouble, and after an encounter with them, McHattie teams up with a waitress
played by Cynthia Belliveau from A New Life, who quickly becomes his partner in both
love and ratcatching!
Meanwhile we are also introduced to a pair
of gravediggers, an older veteran and a fearful younger neophyte, whose
relationship sits somewhere between that of James Karen and Thom Matthews in Return of the Living Dead, and Willem
Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse! Ha ha, having gravediggers in a story is always a good move,
because it injects a little otherwise unearned Shakespearean heft to the piece!
Still more characters are introduced,
namely some cops, one of whom is played by a pre-Scream Neve Campbell! Eventually all these characters converge in
the graveyard, and there is a lot of running around both above ground and
below, in the network of fake-looking, waterlogged tunnels the monster has
burrowed out! But the monster hardly kills anyone, because, you see, as is
spelled out in the amazingly on-the-nose dialogue, the increasingly deranged James
is “worse than the creature!” The monster itself is meant to be sympathetic,
but given the stiffness of its features and limits of its articulation, it’s
hard to really connect to it on an emotional level!
With a surfeit of characters (leading,
frankly, to a character-to-incident ratio that is not favorable to the
picture), a sophomoric script (from the same lad who wrote The Club), mediocre performances (though not outright bad; these
actors are too professional for that) and really underwhelming direction, the
conclusion must and can only be that The
Dark is not a very good movie! Ha ha! I’m still glad to have seen it in a
double bill with my girlfriend at the cinema, because that’s an experience I’ll
always treasure! The cinema and the girl may both be gone, but The Dark still sits in VHS form in my
basement, and I give it one and a half bottles of rat goo!
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