One Dark Night — One Dark Night(Blu Ray)

One Dark Night is a campy, at points decidedly creepy and icky PG horror film from the early 1980s. It finds Psycho 2’s Meg Tilly spending a night in a mausoleum, where a darkly sinister Russian psychic has just been interned- with the film building nicely from 80’s camp teen caper to decidedly chilling and ghoulish horror picture. Here as part, of MVD's Retro collection is a new region free release of the picture- taking in a new high def print, two commentary tracks, selection of cast and crew interviews, and workprint cut of the picture- all featuring packaging that takes in mini-poster, and retro VHS like slip.
 

Appearing in the year 1982 One Dark Night (aka Night of Darkness, The Entity Force, Night in the Crypt, Rest in Peace) was directed/ co-written Tom McLoughlin-Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Sometimes They Come Back. It was his directorial debut- and on the whole, it’s a competent debut offering with a largely likeable cast, well shot and creepy main location. It’s a film that builds well from its teen drama ‘n’ dramatics first half, on though moments of 80’s cheese, before sliding into horror side of things- making it a prime 80’s teen horror film.

The film focuses on Julie( Tilly) a fairly innocent and timid teen who is keen to become part of ‘This sisters’ a blue satin jacket-wearing girl gang in her high school, which is a fairly small gang with just three members. In charge of the gang is the bitchy and big-haired Carol (Robin Evans). So Carol decides Julie has got to do an initiation to get in the gang, and this is spending the night in the marbled corridors of the local mausoleum. Unfortunately, just interned in the building is Karl Rhamarevich- a Russian psychic who has been found dead in his apartment surrounded by a pile of dead teens, and cutlery in the walls. Added into the mix we have Julie’s caring jock boyfriend Steve(David Mason Daniels), and  Karl’s daughter Olivia( Melissa Newman) who finds out her father was involved with sister telekinesis experiments.

The film, for its first half or so, is very much in the campy teen drama setting- as we get cheesy montages of Julie and Steve at the fairground, by the sea, and general happy romancing. Bitchy banter between Carol and the other members of the sisters, and high school drama and dramatics. When getting to the mausoleum- we first move into slight creepy campiness, before things really kick off, and we get floating and barely reanimated bodies appearing and attacking- as the freshly undead Karl controls all by blue lighting coming from his eyes. The design of the corpse is really chilling, and later a little icky- as we see lulling and dripping faces, rigour Mortis stiffened frames, and at one point a character's foot gets stuck in the rotten cage of one of the bodies stomachs. It really is quite surprising how creepy and ghoulishly intense the film gets in its last quarter.
 
I recall the cover of One Dark Night from the VHS days, I never saw it then, so it’s great to finally see it’s now- and all in all I must say it was a neat blend of 80’s teen campy cheesy and creepy-to-ghoulish horror. It’s certainly a film that takes its time to get to the more horror side of things, but I enjoyed the teen preamble- and that adds a more charming, and at points light amusing edge to proceedings.
 
Moving onto this region free blu ray disc, and we get a bumper selection of extras. We get two commentary tracks- the first is with director/ co-writer Tom McLoughlin and producer Michael Schroeder, and the second is with Tom McLoughlin and co-writer Michael Hawes. Both of these are fairly laid back chatter affairs, with a fair bit of similar ground covered on both- of the two I’d say the first is better, as McLoughlin and Schroeder seem to bounce off each other better- we get talk about how the film came about, dissatisfaction with some of the films cutting, locations, actors, shot set-ups etc. Next, we get a great selection of seven new onscreen interviews- these are with McLoughlin(sixteen mins), actress E.G Daily(thirty-two mins), actress Nancy Mott(ten mins), cinematographer Hall Tarusell( eighteen mins), production designer Craig Stearns(ten mins), producer Michael Schroeder( fourteen mins), and spec effects crew member Paul Clemens( for some reason this didn’t work). There’s a thirty-eight minutes of behind the scene footage, and Paul Clemens Scrapbook- this runs three minutes, and find him discuss his film poster/ paper collection. Lastly, we get directors cut/ workprint version of the film- this isn’t drastically different from the normal version, with just a few scenes removed/ altered.
 
After having memories of One Dark Nights VHS box from back in the day- it’s marvellous to see it in this excellent extras packed edition from the folks at MVD rewind. All in all the film is a great mix of cheesy 80’s teen drama and creepy horror- and if that’s your thing, this is most certainly something you need to be tracking down!.