Format: Internet video on The Nook.
There’s a particular sick pleasure to a film like Alone in the Dark from 1982. This is a cheap horror film, the first film ever produced and distributed by New Line Cinema, so there aren’t a lot of surprises in terms of the subject matter here. The cast, though, is crazy for a cheap slasher film. It says something when Dwight Schultz whose greatest claim to acting fame comes from his roles as the crazy Murdoch on The A-Team plays the sanest one in the bunch. Donald Pleasence isn’t too difficult to cast in a film like this one—he had a track record, and seeing Jack Palance hamming it up as a psycho isn’t a stretch. But Martin Landau? If nothing else, I had to see this just for that.
Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) shows up for his new job in a psychiatric hospital headed by Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), who operates a very different sort of mental facility. Bain is of the belief that his patients should be given a great deal of autonomy and that they aren’t so much crazy as they are simply off on little mental vacations. He thinks this of all of his mental patients, including the dangerously, criminally insane men on the third floor. This group of four includes military veteran Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), a dangerous paranoid who is convinced that Dan Potter got his position by killing the previous doctor; Byron Sutcliff (Martin Landau), a preacher with a penchant for burning churches with the congregation still inside; Ronald “Fatty” Elster (Erland van Lidth), a gigantic child molester; and Skaggs (Phillip Clark), known as “the Bleeder” because he gets nose bleeds when he attacks a victim.
