One Dark Night (1983)

This 1982 horror film begins with a woman attending her father's funeral and she learns that he used psychic powers on victims. Meanwhile, a college girl is sent by 2 sorority sisters to spend the night in a mausoleum as part of an initiation. They try to scare her, but become trapped inside with the man's powerful, spirit unleashing other corpses/bodies which terrorize them. Meg Tilly (Psycho II) and the late, Adam West (Batman) are featured. This isn't bad, but I think it could've been better. It kind of has a "Phantasm" vibe with some gory make-up effects and a chilling score. Give it a try at least once if you're into horror.

One Dark Night (1982) ** (out of 4) Julie (Meg Tilly) isn't the most popular girl at her college but she's willing to do everything to join The Sisters and their gang. What Julie doesn't know is that the leader basically wants her to audition so that they can get revenge on the girl for dating her boyfriend. That night Julie finds herself locked in a mausoleum when the girls decide to try and scare her. The only problem is that a recently deceased psychic decides to bring the dead back to life.Tom McLoughlin's ONE DARK NIGHT is a film that I respected a lot more than I actually liked. You have to give the director and co-writer a lot of credit because a non R-rated horror film in 1982 is something very rare. It's obviously that the director was working on a limited budget and I'm going to guess that instead of trying to add a lot of gore effects he instead wanted to create something scary. This is one of those films that nothing happens for the first portion as the atmosphere grows and the director wants to eventually have all the scares at once.This is a rather interesting movie because for the first hour there's really not too much that happens. We basically get to know all of the characters as we learn about them, learn about their relations and we very slowly get to the point where the three females are inside the mausoleum and the fun begins. The final thirty-minutes is when various things start to happen including the dead returning to life. If you're looking for any sort of gore then you can forget it as there's really not a drop until the very end. In fact, the violence is extremely low as is the body count.That explains the PG-rating to the picture and it's interesting that McLoughlin would go this direction. I personally respect him trying to build up scares more than anything else but the problem is that the first hour drags pretty badly. When the film finally starts to pick up it's a tad bit too late but there's no question that there's some fun to be had during the finale. Tilly turns in a good and believable performance and we get some fun supporting performances from Melissa Newman, Elizabeth Daily and Robin Evans. Adam West also appears in a few scenes.ONE DARK NIGHT isn't a masterpiece or even a good movie but it's an interesting horror film for the era.

This thing takes forever to get going. Scenes and scenarios repeat over and over and over again. Seriously, they kept showing the same sequences of shots over and over again. It felt like they added unnecessary scenes and dialogue and the director told everyone in every scene to draw things out just to pad it for time. Even the credits at the end are slow.The acting was tolerable, and the makeup and effects were actually pretty good, but this thing is way too painful to sit through for what to me was a horrible ending and "payoff". It really is too bad. Seems like they had a good crew. If only they would have had a decent script.

Talk about (pleasant?) surprises! Without ever having seen it, I always assumed that "One Dark Night" was just another umpteenth and uninspired teen slasher – based on the title and the premise about a sorority initiation – but actually it's a tad bit more ambitious and versatile than that. Please don't misinterpret; "One Dark Night" is NOT a good film, but at least it pretends to be better than most of its contemporary genre colleagues. There's an awesome opening sequence where you witness a convoy of coroner trucks arrive at a house to pick up what must be the most macabre discovery of the century. The culprit of a series of murders, an elderly man who apparently thought he was a "psychic vampire", also died at the scene and leaves his estranged daughter behind with lots of questions pondering on her mind. The mausoleum where the strange old man is buried just also happens to be the abode for an initiation ritual of a girly high school sister sorority. The very young Meg Tilly has to spend the night in a mausoleum, but she's too stupid to realize that the lead sister is the ex of her current boyfriend and hates her guts. She rather dies than to take accept Julie into her clique, so they break into the mausoleum as well with the intention to scare Julie away. The psychic vampire (apparently he's only a type of zombie-master, after all) comes to life, obviously, and the girls are trapped inside. The entire first hour of "One Dark Night" is dull and with practically nothing going on. I actually even almost wished it would be another umpteenth slasher, in fact! Luckily enough, the final twenty minutes compensate for a lot, with sinister images of coffins slowly sliding out of their tombs and bodies emerging. The original thing, however, is that they're not zombies. The corpses remain dead and motionless, but they're being "operated" through little blue lightening firing from the eyes of the psychic zombie. This probably makes "One Dark Night" the only film ever to feature a character dying from suffocation underneath a pile of rotting corpses. The climax is a hodgepodge of gore and senselessness, but sadly there's no sleaze. One of the sorority chicks continuously chews on a toothbrush, though, which is quite odd and – who knows – maybe arousing to some?