A Torre do Crime

.. But isn't!

What a confused and boring mess! Firstly, there seems no reason whatsoever for it to be set in Barcelona given the actors are all American or English!

The standard of acting on offer is quite dreadful, even Jenny Agutter sucks, big time!

Hard to believe that Freddie Francis directed this, what was he thinking?

The whole thing has a made for TV feel about it, feels really cheap.

The actual premise is good, and had it been dealt with more professionally, perhaps this would have been a decent film, but as it stands, it's not one I'd recommend at all. Doesn't even fall into the so bad it's good category.

I'd been meaning to rent this for a while, and finally last night, I did, and I must say, I liked it.

Jenny Agutter ("American Werewolf in London") plays Carolyn Page, the head architect of a new skyskraper, towering over metropolitan Spain. Things are going well until a window-washer drops twenty-eight stories off the pulley, and lands on the top executive of the building. Michael Moriarity plays Dennis Randall, who is brought onto the case of the murders. Incidentally, he is also having an affair with Carolyn, who is haunted by her dead husband. In fact, so is the building, and as more people die, and Dr. Max Gold (Theodore Bikel) an exorcist, is brought in, the real secrets of the dark tower are slowly revealed, leading up to an exciting climax with a few unexpected twists.

Entertaining movie, with extremely effective music. If anything, see the movie for the music. It really envokes a feeling of dread, especially in the end chase scene. The movie plays well, and is well-acted. The ending has some surprising twists, and the only flaw was the somewhat silly looking demon. Other than that, a good movie, which gets quite tense towards the end, and has great music. Check it out.

About average movie that looks like a TV film, with some decent semi scary scenes. The acting's ok but seems to be redubbed, which I think was the case for most movies made in Spain at the time. It's Jenny Agutter who carries the film though, getting more and more frightened as the film goes on. As what seems usual with her films she does seem to spend the final scenes running about with her shirt undone (not a bad thing).

THE DARK TOWER is an obscure movie that had a lot of potential but squandered the whole interesting idea of an evil building due to some really weak acting, a listless script, totally unfocused direction, and a cast that's seemingly above the age of 40! It's always great to see Jenny Agutter in anything but she deserved a better project than this. The direction is truly bizarre. I'm sure the fact that the great Freddie Francis was replaced by another director has contributed to the weirdness of the film but I wonder what they were attempting to do. It's as if they tried to make the building into a character, and at a certain point, they actually succeeded, not because of some great feat of direction but because the human characters are so weak and messed up that the building looked positively sturdy and 3 dimensional compared to them.

And speaking of humans, I've never seen such an old looking cast. Yes, Jenny was in her late 30s when she made the movie but because practically everyone is above a certain age, this gave the movie a sorta poky feel to it, which was the last thing THE DARK TOWER needed.

But the thing that kills this bizarre quasi-mess is the ending, or the resolution of the mystery/story. It was more funny than scary. One has to see it to believe it.

A real curio of a movie worth seeing for fans of bizarre films.

"Dark Tower" is a "Poltergeist" rip-off about a dark spirit, ghost, or whatever you want to call it taking over a skyscraper. The "ghost" starts off by killing people in the building such as the window washer and that is when cop Micheal Moriarty is called to the case. Michael Moriarty is a good actor, too bad he has to act in garbage like this! Even worse than Moriary's other bad horror films such as "A Return to Salem's Lot" and "It's Alive III: Island of the Alive". Just a word of advice, AVOID IT!