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One Dark Night
[Shriek Show]
1982; color
Directed by Tom McLoughlin
Starring: Meg Tilly, Melissa Newman, Robin Evans, Leslie Speights, Donald Hotton, Elizabeth Daily & Adam West
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I'm pretty sure One Dark Night was stocked at the video store I managed in the mid to late '80s, although I think we had the version released under title Mausoleum. Either way, it was a dust collector. (Meaning a tape no one ever rented, and for good reason.) Starring a pre-famous, pre-Oscar, Meg Tilly along with (in lesser roles) E.G. Daily and Adam West (whose role is so minute he only has four or five lines and three or four minutes of screen time), rounded out by a cast of nobodies, this high school horror flick is... well... high-schoolish in every regard. Tilly plays a girl who wants to join a sorority-esque clique, the Sisters, but first must spend the night in a local mausoleum as a sort of hazing / initiation ritual. The larger plan is for the already initiated Sisters - yep, all three of them - to scare her while she tries to sweat out the uncomfortable and creepy accommodations. Unfortunately a newly interred resident, who just so happens to be a psycho-kinetic psychic, has post-mortem plans that change everything. The dead psychic, Raymar, was apparently so powerful and proficient with his powers that, even in death, he's able to move inanimate objects at will. Sound preposterous? Wait, it gets better. This guy can also shoot electrical charges that look like small lightning bolts from his eyes. These charges are like control beams which, after a bit of the typical poltergeist-like object shenanigans, begin to explode open tombs in the mausoleum, slide out the coffins, open them, re-animate the corpses and send them on a killing spree. Tilly spends most of her time being terrorized by the girls before the three, in turn, are smothered by the corpses piling up on top of them. Then Tilly's just terrorized by the walking dead. While all this is going on at the mausoleum (interestingly, the famous Hollywood Mausoleum where stars like Charlie Chaplin are interred), Raymar's estranged daughter discovers, via a cassette tape given to her by a psychic researcher who knew her dad, her father's powers and the fact his psychic, and psycho-kinetic, powers are often passed down from generation to generation. According to what she hears on the tape, her dad was also a pretty evil dude who could drain people's life energies and re-animate their corpses with his mind. (And those lightning bolts.) The daughter keeps having visions of girls running around the mausoleum screaming and makes a late night drive to the place to confront dead daddy. When she arrives, she's miraculously able to end all the craziness by shining a mirror from a makeup compact into Raymar's eyes, thus bouncing the lightning bolts back into him and making his head shrivel up. Then, thankfully, it ends. I would only recommend this flick for '80s horror completists, and insomniacs who don't like prescription sleep aids. Otherwise it's one to be avoided.
—the Kommandant
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