Graveyard pranks

 ONE DARK NIGHT (1981)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"One Dark Night" is juvenile horror with scant scares, an incoherent storyline and not much narrative thrust. Well, there's the thrust of the movie's climax inside a mausoleum although "Phantasm" beat that to the punch with more vivid thrills two years earlier. Still, for such a silly horror picture, I was rather taken by it.

A bizarre set of murders have taken place inside an apartment where an old Russian occultist, with telekinesis powers, is found dead along with a few dead young women in a closet. In what looks like an infinite number of ambulances rolling in to recover the bodies, one paramedic is struck by how objects are protruding through the walls. Some older man wearing sunglasses observes this chaos. Then he reappears at that dead Russian man's daughter's house, telling her that her father had special powers. Naturally such powers extend beyond the grave and the mausoleum where he is confined. And wouldn't you know that some high-school girls who have a clique called "Sisters" are prepared to give one tempted girl (Meg Tilly) an indoctrination to their group if she stays overnight at the mausoleum! All she has to do is sleep there overnight. Two of the three "Sisters" group decide to scare her at the mausoleum with a Halloween mask! Oh, my, all this to be a member of such a small group.

"One Dark Night" is too damn silly to take as a serious or even as a goofy horror picture - it is probably on the level of a young adult horror story that might have been featured in the 80's collection book of "Scary Stories." Nothing makes a lick of sense, nor does this putrid dead man whose coffin breaks through the walls of the mausoleum and electrical charges emit from his dead eyes. This somehow reanimates all the corpses in the mausoleum with coffins bursting ad infinitum. The girls see the horrors and scream, and run from one end of this locked edifice to the other. You know what you are getting when you watch it, minus any blood or gore, but the movie is far more absorbing with Melissa Newman as the daughter of this Russian yet every time she appears (along with Adam West as her husband), the narrative is threatened by these stupid prankish girls and Meg Tilly's boyfriend who is looking for her in his motorcycle! Trim such mischief and mischievous "Sisters" characters, beef up Meg Tilly's part beyond her being scared silly and give Melissa Newman more screen time and you might have had a true sleeper. It is sort of creepily entertaining at times with truly creepy atmosphere inside that mausoleum yet "One Dark Night" would have benefitted from a clearer focus.