Nuit noire

i saw "One Dark Night" in the theater when i was 12 years old, and BOY...was i scared! HEHEHE Seeing it now, im obviously not shaking in my seat, but it its still a fun ride. A lot of 'zombie' movie fans have a lot of trouble with this movie (evident of the other comments on this page), but the corpses in this film aren't really zombies as much as puppet-like instruments used by the 'psychic vampire' to terrorize those trapped in the mosoleum. i will agree that this film takes an awfully long time to get off its feet, and all the talk of psychics and psychic power being inheritied bog the story down. However, once Meg Tilly finds her way into the deserted mosoleum, its a lot of fun, and a little gory (which is fun in itself, right?)

Meg Tilly plays a girl that has to spend the night in a mausoleum as part of a club initiation. The club is basically just three chicks, one of which is Dottie from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Why Meg wants to be a part of this club is silly. It's pretty much the same motivation used on Leave It to Beaver whenever Beaver let his friends talk him into something stupid. Anyway, turns out a psychic vampire named Karl Raymar has been buried in the crypt Meg's spending the night. Wouldn't you know it, he returns from the dead this night and terrorizes Meg and the other girls.

It's a fun little movie if you don't have high expectations. There's zombies, lots of cool electrical effects, and some nice creepy atmosphere. Don't let the rating dissuade you from trying it out. It may not please the gore & guts crowd but it's a pretty good low-budget horror movie.

Multiply named and strangely casted, "One Dark Night" aka "Mausoleum", is one of the better early horror video-rentals. Original and quite raw, we meet Adam West briefly in this film about telekinesis and teen-age headgames. Meg Tilly is dared into spending the night in a crypt by "The Sisters" a high-school gang of hair-hoppers in blue satin jackets. The initiation is interrupted by the recently interred body of a mass-murdering psychic wizard called "Raymar". Surprisingly awesome make-up and scare effects paints this chiller film with style and deliver a heart-pounding climax.

I consider myself a veteran of horror films from the late 70's to the early 80's, so that time frame is in my wheelhouse, and this fits right into that category. While nothing in this mainly forgotten film has the wow factor, it also doesn't have the typical boring formula that plagued so many horror films around that time. This movie's "mausoleum" subject matter was sandwiched between other films of similar subject matter, such as Phantasm(1979), and Mausoleum(1983). The familiar faces include a serious acting Adam West, and Meg Tilly, as this was one of her first starring roles. I'm sure you know the plot by now, so I'll skip the details, but I felt the Raymar character was different from the standard "bad" guys in the horror genre, although the purple rays emanating from his eyes were a tad overdone when the madness and mayhem break out. I do feel the PG rating hurt, and perhaps that's a reason why it doesn't get the attention it probably deserves. Let me also mention I'm glad there wasn't the pointless nude scene, as films in that era were known for, but perhaps something could've been added to get an R rating. If you get the chance to catch this rarity, and you're a fan of the genre like me, then by all means spend the 90 minutes of your life deciding if this is worth your time. I'm glad I did.

Apparently Adam West's presence here has some fans referring to this movie as such. More about Adam in a moment...

Three cool sorority chicks (we know they're 'cool' because they talk 'cool', swagger in a 'cool' way, and have 'cool' jackets with 'The Sisters' printed across the backs which doesn't in any way look dorky) are overseeing the initiation of Julie, a girl desperate to join. However, lead 'cool' girl Carol has got it in for Julie because Julie is in a relationship with Carol's ex; so Carol decides the final part of Julie's initiation will be for her to spend a night in a mausoleum (where an incredibly powerful psychic was recently interred). The plan is that once Julie has been locked inside, Carol and the other girls will sneak back and frighten the life out of her. If Julie quits, she fails.

So, a pretty standard sorority hazing horror. What *isn't* standard is how unbelievably slow it is, how long it takes before anything remotely 'horrific' happens onscreen. We get an hour and a quarter of teen relationship drama, jealousy, and snarkiness - plus every now and then someone reminding us how powerful the aforementioned psychic was - before things finally start to happen. It's a shame, because when things do start happening they're quite good (in an '80s horror' kind of way).

As for Adam West... I love West. I loved his Batman show. But his character here is completely - and very obviously - utterly superfluous. He plays the husband of the daughter of the psychic. The only characters he interacts with are his wife and some weird Andy Warhol lookalike who turns up at their house (and who acts like West isn't there most of the time!). I've read that West was given the part because the director sympathised with his difficulty in finding work after Batman; looking at this I could believe the role was actually *created* solely for this reason, as it serves no other purpose.

Meg Tilly plays Julie and gives the best performance (although that's not saying much). Robin Evans is hot as Carol, and Elizabeth Daily is CUTE as Carol's friend, Leslie. That, plus a fun final 15 minutes, just scrapes this a 6/10. It's not one I'll watch again.