January, Tuesday 24, 2006

The Dark (1979)

From the hands of the great John "Bud" Cardos (the "genius" behind Kingdom of the Spiders and The Day Time Ended) brings us a movie that started out as a standard monster/slasher movie, and then changed to a laserbeam-eyeball alien killer movie. Who also decapitates his victims if he didn't blow 'em up with his eyes. No, seriously. I'm not making this up. Trying to hunt down this evil creature are a pair of incompetent cops who think its okay to try and shut off the media while on air (real rocket scientists, these two), a rich ex-con author (murder'd his wife's lover, out in 7 years. Only in California!), and Cathy Lee Crosby as a up-and-coming reported. So, the monster is unconcerned, and rightly so. Only by the wildest of coincidenes do these idiots manage to even FIND the monster. And then they destroy him accidentally. What a crowd of champions!

But what do we expect from a man who learned his trade from the hands of Al Adamson? Yeah, a cursory examination of "Bud"'s filmography shows a bunch of Al's "classics". Yeah, birds of a feature flock together.

The disc actually has a couple of nice features. No subtitles, but the commentary is actually quite lively and fun. And there's a nice interview that goes into "Bud"'s history in more detail. Gotta like that.

Three beers out of five. (Would have been nice to see Cathy Lee naked, but no such luck)