Alone in the Dark (1982)

I can’t remember how I found out about this movie, all I know is it was highly entertaining. How can it not be with Jack Palance, Donald Pleasance, Martin Landau, and an appearance of a punk band called The Sick F*cks?

Alone in the Dark is about a psychiatrist who has just been assigned to working at the local sanitarium with Dr. Bain (Donald Pleasance). Dr. Bain is a little bit of a hippy, and on the fourth floor of his hospital he houses a group of men who are very dangerous. Dr. Bain, of course, has all sorts of rosy ideas about these guys, and doesn’t believe they are capable of violence anymore. The new doctor, Dr. Potter isn’t so sure. Not only is his family a little high strung, his sister, newly recovered from a nervous breakdown, has come to town. Needless to say, things are a bit sticky at home, so when the guys on the 4th floor get it into their heads that the new doc actually killed the old doc and replaced him, and like only a movie can do, there’s a huge power outage, the psychos escape and head towards the new docs house to seek revenge.

There are some very good scenes here. Not only do the babysitter and her boyfriend have a pretty tense dispatching (excellent imagery here folks), the little girl gets to have a tense knifing scene and a scary pedophile in the guise of a babysitter scene, the sister gets to have some claustrophobic breakdown revisits, and there’s of course the twist ending that may not be so surprising anymore but is still good. The best parts go to Martin Landau, Donald Pleasance, and Jack Palance chewing up the scenery in their parts. They all look like they had a great time filming this movie. And honestly, what could be scarier: your family, locked up in your house with no weapons, no phone, no electricity, and a group of psychos armed to the teeth outside? Yikes!

Like I said, it was much better than I expected, and well worth a visit in the sanitarium. Just don’t get any psychos convinced you killed off their old doctor. It might mean trouble.

Rating: 5 Purrs for punk bands with cardboard axes singing “chop up your mother” and the nuclear power plant protest. Oh the 80’s.