Dark Ride

Saw this recently on a dvd. As a fan of After dark horror fest, this film was on my radar for a long time. Dark Ride is nothing special from a story standpoint. Every classic slasher trope and cliche imaginable was used in this film. The character traits, situations, and dialogue feel formulaic. After the opening murder scene, it takes a hell lottuva time for the thrill ride to jump start. There ain't any good kills except for one which i don't want to spoil. Also some of the scenes r filled with annoying flickering lights. Again like many 80s slasher films, we get to see characters doing stupid things. Splitting up, ample time to run but jus keep on screaming n crying, not taking an effort to fight back. We also get to see a psycho breaking his cuffs n escaping from a mental asylum like a piece of cake, etc. A hot girl wandering n hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere. I think this film seems to have been made in the wrong time period or mayb viewed by me in a totally wrong time.

Dark Ride is slick and professionally made but that's the only real good thing about it. For a start, the plot. A group of teens spend the night in a closed "dark ride" as a dare, not realising that a killer is lurking in the ride with them and there is no way out. I mean really, "The Funhouse" did this already about 20 years ago, and saying this is a tribute or something neatly avoids saying it basically just rips the whole thing off.

There's nothing else to say about the plot, so let me say that there a few more things this film doesn't do as well as it should. First of all the so called "dark ride" looks great - but so it should , it seems to be as big an aircraft hanger!! There's no way a real ride in such a run down resort as this one is supposed to be could be so enormous and with seemingly endless rooms devices and contraptions. Most of the time when the teens are wandering about they seem to be in various horror sets that take up whole rooms with no trace of any rail tracks on the floor to carry the ride's cars (it's a ghost train so where are the trains supposed to be going?).

Now sadly another thing that drags the film down is some real hammy acting by the central cast. Fits of screaming and sobbing, running into walls, shivering and blubbering, no histrionic emotion is left unused, and it soon becomes very tiresome. I really didn't care about any of the characters.

What the film does have is some effective, good old fashioned gore, with some surprisingly graphic slaughters. That and the fun of the wacky exhibits of the actual ride itself are the good points in what is otherwise a rather unimpressive movie.

Part of the popular After Dark Horror Film Festival (which included the remarkable horror film, "The Abandoned" among seven others), "Dark Ride" is a weirdly entertaining little slasher film heavily reminiscent of Tobe Hooper's "The Funhouse". The story follows a group of college friends who decide to go on a trip during spring break. While driving through New Jersey late one night, they have a bizarre encounter at a gas station, and later pick up a ditsy hitchhiker with a good stash of drugs. The kids decide to stop at an amusement park to check out the "dark ride", a horror ride that was closed down for years after two twin sisters were murdered there in 1989. The murderer is now institutionalized, but for these unlucky teenagers, he has escaped within the past two weeks. As they enter the ride and decide to spend some time messing around in there with all of the scary props and whatnot, they aren't aware of the real horrors that await them.

While this film was very obviously inspired by Tobe Hooper's slasher film, "The Funhouse", it honestly is nowhere near as good. But would one expect it to be any better? Nah, I don't think so. Besides this, "Dark Ride" is still an enjoyable little blood-soaked horror flick. The plot is beyond derivative, and the script is pretty jammed full with typical horror set-ups and clichés - we've seen it all before, plenty of times. Not much originality here, but oh well. While the story does lack any uniqueness or originality, it makes up for it with some good thrills and a full plate of some cheap (but clever) scares and violence. It's a pretty gory film, but I think that's what it was going for anyway so it works. We have plenty of gruesome stabbings, slashings, head-splittings, and a grossly clever decapitation that could likely become of cult status (I won't explain, you'll know it when you see it for sure). The sets inside the horror ride were really nicely done, and appropriately spooky. Amusement rides like that have an eerie thing about them anyway, so I love the setting.

The acting in the film is so-so. Jamie Lynn-DiSalca (of TV's "The Sopranos") is the heroine, and is just alright - not anything mind blowing, but passable enough with her performance. The male stars are actually the better actors in the film though, I'm sure some of you will recognize Patrick Renna of the '90s Disney film, "The Big Green", I knew I'd seen that face before. The rest of the cast isn't bad, but the performances were overall no more than average (if not a little below). When considering what type of movie this is though, the acting quality is almost irrelevant. The killer in the film is creepy, not because of his physical deformity, but more so because of his child-like porcelain mask that he wears throughout the film. I thought the 'twist' in the end was actually pretty good, it came totally out of nowhere for me, so I have to give that some credit because the writing there was pretty good.

Overall, "Dark Ride" is an enjoyable little slasher fest that isn't much more than that. It's formulaic, clichéd, and predictable in quite a few ways. But it still manages to be entertaining and fun aside from it's downfalls. Hardened horror buffs will know exactly what to expect, and will feel like they've seen it a hundred times. But if you enjoy a good old corny slasher flick, this weird little throwback to '80s style splatter pictures might be an enjoyable find. It isn't a great movie by any means, but I have to give it a half-and-half rating at least because it was pretty entertaining for what it was. 5/10.

Dark Ride

It starts out with two young girls being brutally murdered by a psychopath that lives inside an amusement park attraction call "Dark Ride". After being incarcerated for over a decade, the killer escapes from the mental hospital and takes refuge inside the now abandoned Dark Ride. Meanwhile, a group of college students on Spring Break decide to spend the night inside the abandoned amusement park ride for thrills, and to save money rather than spend it in a hotel. This is where they start getting knocked off one by one by the killer who now wears a childlike mask to conceal his facial deformity. I thought this was a decent flick. The writing was not great, but there was some great jokes within the film itself. There is a great kill scene that involves decapitation and oral sex. It was good stuff. I'll definitely be looking for this on DVD. There was also some recognizable actors within this film like Jamie-Lynn Di Scala (The Sopranos), and Patrick Renna (The Sandlot). The only problem I had with this movie was the ending. I think it tried too hard to have a twist ending like the Saw films, but it was worth the 1hr 50 min of my time.

After watching this film, I can see that the director borrowed elements of Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Tobe Hooper's : The Funhouse, which there was a number of similarities between The Funhouse and Dark Ride range from teenagers spending the night within the attraction to being hunted down by a deformed killer to the creepy puppets and horror props that create the eerie ambiance of the films.

I was extremely excited to see this movie (it was my most anticipated of the Horrorfest lineup) and I'm not too sure what I'm thinking about it at the moment. The plot was very basic and reminded me a lot of your average 80's slasher flicks, but theses are the films I grew up watching, so that's a huge plus. The dialog was far from perfect, but there actually were a few intentionally funny bits that had me and the rest of the theater cracking up. The acting wasn't too awful, but the character of Liz pretty much annoyed the hell out of me the entire time she was on screen. Actually, most of the characters were rude asses and I didn't really care if any of them were going to live or die. The stoner characters were by far the most amusing, though. There were a few scenes of decent gore including a very original beheading that I didn't see coming, and a few scenes built up decent tension and suspense. I also enjoyed the cinematography for the most part. It was very stylized and gave the film it's own unique feel even if the plot and circumstances were clichéd to the max. Also, the killer was very imposing and the mask he wore was really sweet. On the down side, the ending felt incomplete and the unnecessary "twist" was not surprising at all. Almost all of the suspense scenes didn't go anywhere as the killer like to toy with his victims too much and let them get away just in time. This got a little frustrating after a while and I just wanted to see some freakin' action already! Overall, Dark Ride was a much slower paced movie that the preview made it seem, the characters did all of the stupid things that you would expect them to, there was gratuitous nudity and blood (in a few parts) and the killer and setting were very creepy. It was a fun movie, but not one that I would rush out to see by any means of the imagination. I'd give it an above average 6.5/10.