It’s time for yet another B-Movie Enema article (the 425th to be exact)!

This week, I’m looking at a movie that I’ve known for decades. Even going back to when I was a little kid and watching scary movies between my fingers trying to hide my eyes, I seem to remember a movie about a girl spending a night alone inside a mausoleum and ultimately getting attacked by zombies and having to fight her way out. The problem was, every time I tried looking up what that movie was I was trying to remember so I can try to find it to watch again, somehow either I kept getting it mixed up with or finding the result to be 1981’s Hell Night starring Linda Blair.

It’s not that because it’s 1982’s One Dark Night starring Meg Tilly!

One Dark Night comes from director Tom McLoughlin. He’s kind of a favorite around here for one specific reason. I’ve covered two of his films before. In fact, both of his previous films were covered in 2017. The first was during my Phoebe Cates Month when I reviewed Date with an Angel. Then, later in October, for the spooky season of that same year, I covered the film that I love him best for… My favorite Jason film, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Now that I’m covering One Dark Night, that will actually round out the triumvirate of his first three films. Oddly, I covered them in reverse order too.

Before he directed this film, he tried breaking in as a screenwriter but also was taking whatever stuff he could get in movies. He played the monster in Prophecy. Have you seen that movie? The monster is a monster, mutated bear. It’s kind of wild. Maybe the most wild thing about the movie is that Talia Shire is in it. I guess those Rocky and Godfather checks weren’t paying all her bills in 1979. Eventually, One Dark Night broke through for him. He co-wrote the script with Michael Hawes and based it on various ideas like gothic horror and the concept of psychic vampires who can suck the lifeforce from others. After several years of trying to sell the movie to a studio, along came a group of Mormons who gave them a million bucks to make the movie if they could start filming in just three weeks.

I want to say, if that’s the conditions of making a movie, you have to question whether or not people funding the movie are trying to take advantage of a tax write-off or maybe made the money in some less-than-lawful way and trying to get rid of some of it before being caught by the fuzz.

Initially, it’s said that McLoughlin wanted a kind of geeky, but pretty, blonde in the lead role as Jullie Wells. But after auditioning some, including Sharon Stone, he ended up giving the role to Meg Tilly who was about to have a really great breakout. She had already appeared in a bit part in Fame in 1980. She then appeared in the S.E. Hinton adaptation Tex with Matt Dillon (who apparently was always chosen to be in S.E. Hinton books-turned-films). But after One Dark Night, she would go on to have two very memorable roles in 1983 that launched her career. These roles would be in the surprisingly good Psycho II and then the box office hit The Big Chill.

This is also the return of Adam West, who is cast in the role of Allan McKenna. West, of course, has been seen here twice before. Way back in the early days of the blog, I covered Alexander the Great which featured him and William Shatner. Then, in 2018, I covered the hilariously dumb Zombie Nightmare that will forever hold a very special place in my heart. I wouldn’t expect too much from West in this movie because his name is way down in the cast list on Wikipedia and I don’t remember him being a major part of this movie. He’s likely the name that sold this movie to various markets.

One Dark Night, along with Phantasm, most definitely lent to my being fairly freaked out by mausoleums. As the movie begins, we’re shown shots of a cemetery’s mausoleum and various graves and such. To set the tone appropriately, we also have thunder and lightning on, what else? A dark night.

Tossing and turning in bed is Olivia, played by Melissa Newman. It would appear she has a bit of the “sight” as she envisions a young woman hitchhiking and being picked up by a guy in a car. She snaps out of her vision when she has a vision of “seeing” the girl being killed.

Sure enough, the next morning, a whole army of people from the coroner’s office arrive at the scene of a crime where a bunch of dead girls were found. In addition to the girls, a man in his early 70s is also found dead. Over the radio, someone on the scene talks about the condition of the apartment where the bodies were found. Inside, furniture is tossed and overturned. There are plates and eating utensils are sticking out of the walls as if they’ve been flung into it like the wall was a dartboard.

Oh and there’s a closet o’ dead girls.

When the coroners load the old guy onto the stretcher for transport, his hand slips out from under the sheet and fires off a Palpatine-like beam of lightning that puts a whole in the ceiling.

I definitely haven’t seen this movie for a while… or at least I’ve not seen it for a long time. I don’t remember anything about the old guy’s apartment. I definitely think I would have remembered a closet o’ dead girls. That seems like something I would very very likely remember. After the Palpatine-style lightning discharge from the old man, the camera swoops through a mausoleum before we meet some of the high school characters for this movie.

Of course, our leading lady is Julie, played by Meg Tilly looking, as always, very cute. Her boyfriend, with whom she is having lunch, is Steve. Now, Julie seems to be a good girl and a little bashful and definitely rockin’ that Angora sweater in a way that would make Ed Wood proud. She has a little bit of popularity ambitions at school. She wants to join a clique called the Sisters. The Sisters are comprised of a trio of snobby bitches. They are Carol, Kitty, and Leslie. Leslie is played by voice actress supreme Elizabeth Daily. Before being a major voice actress in the 90s and 00s, she is eternally known for being Dottie in Pee-Wee’s Big Aventure.

Interestingly, Leslie Speights, who plays Kitty, would also go on to become a voice actress with a handful of credits in the 80s.

Now for the thrust of the movie, as it pertains to the main plot, you have to understand Carol is pretty bitchy. Steve used to date Carol. He’s pretty lovey-lovey with Julie. This makes Carol jealous. She’s been putting Julie to the test to earn her purple Sisters jacket. According to Leslie, Julie’s passed all the tests and they might just as well call her a Sister even if Carol isn’t ready to. Carol says she’s got a big test for Julie tonight and it’s gonna be the one that rids them of her for good.

Over in the B plot, Olivia, the girl with the visions of murder we saw earlier, is the daughter of the old man who died with that closet o’ dead girls and the Palpatine powers. She’s being hounded by the press over it. Her father was a Russian named Karl Raymar who dabbled in the occult. She doesn’t really believe her father was involved in the murders and sexual assault of the girls. It would seem the court of public opinion has already found her father guilty, though.

Her husband, Allan, is played by Batman… er I mean Adam Batman. WEST! Batman West.

During the funeral, Olivia has visions of our high school characters being chased through the mausoleum by a treacherous entity. She also sees her father’s casket slide out of the tomb it’s put into. However, I think it’s just the creepy Eastern Orthodox ceremony and the priest’s guttural chanting that upsets her and she’s taken away by Batman. That would give anyone terrifying visions of shenanigans in a creepy ol’ mausoleum.

There’s also another thing about this old guy. Outside of the crime scene and, later, the funeral, there’s been another old dude creeping around. He seems to have quite an interest in Raymar and what’s going on with his apartment and the creepy Orthodox service.

Back in the A plot, Julie and Steve have a fun day on the boardwalk. They play video games at the arcade. They have a rousing match of air hockey… You know, all the fun things to do. Julie asks Steve what his big goal is in life. He says he wants to be on the team at USC (I don’t remember which sport, so I’ll just imagine it’s the mathletes). Julie brings this up because she has a similar ambition to belong to something. Steve, exasperated, says she must be referring to this silly Sisters thing. Steve tries to explain that Carol is jealous and just trying to torture Julie for fun. Julie says that it’s a big deal to her because she constantly hears about how much of a good girl she is and it bothers her. She’s sick of the constant goody two-shoes labels she’s had all her life. Later, Steve goes to Carol’s house to tell her to knock it off with these initiations and leave Julie alone. Carol tries seducing Steve but he rejects her.

Pissed at Steve for the rejection, Carol calls Julie to tell her she’s got her last initiation test and she needs to pack a sleeping bag as it’s gonna be an allnighter.

Allan and Olivia are met by that old guy who keeps hanging around. His name is Dockstader and he’s a writer. He knows a lot about the occult. He tells Julie that her father was a psychic vampire. He drains people of their energy and then uses it to expand his own bioenergy to use it as telekinesis. He used the power in a dark way against Dockstader’s warning. In fact, it is what ultimately killed him. However, he’s not really dead. Allan doesn’t believe any of this ESP, woo-woo, telekinesis crap even if Olivia is complaining of the strange dreams and visions she’s been having again.

The girls get to the cemetery before it closes for the night so they can lock Julie inside the mausoleum. Obviously, the mausoleum by itself is hardly scary in the daylight. I mean, yeah, they are creepy, but if all things are equal, mausoleums aren’t that scary. Sure, they are echo-y, cavernous, full of dead bodies, and Tall Mans, but they aren’t scary as it is. Sure, Julie isn’t so sure about being stuck in there all night at first, but she’s not going to miss her chance to be a Sister.

Naturally, that means the girls are also going to mess with her to really ramp up the creepiness of the whole sleepover.

While Julie is walking around, looking at the various notes and pictures loved ones have left behind for their dead family members, one of the vases on Raymar’s vault falls to the floor on its own and shatters. The front of his vault is also cracking. This scene of Julie walking around the mausoleum and the ambient organ sound just humming and droning under the entire scene does really recall that nervous tension of Phantasm.

Like I said, both of these movies really set the stage for me to not be a big fan of mausoleums. I’m sure I’m not the only one, and I’m sure a lot of people don’t like them on their own and not because of the two movies that featured them heavily in the late 70s and early 80s. They seem cold. They have tall ceilings and gothic style to them. And they are totally lousy with dead bodies and Tall Mans.

As night falls, Julie’s found a room she can hole up in inside the mausoleum. It even has a window. The flashlight the Sisters gave her turned out to be a trick as she opens it and a joke snake flies out of it. Steve went to her house looking for her only to find no one at home. Of course, we know where Julie is (which he didn’t because he went straight to practice after turning down Carol’s offer of sex when he confronted her about her hard-on for torturing Julie) and her mother is gone until Sunday night which we learned before Carol called Julie to tell her about her final test. Meanwhile, Olivia listens to a tape Dockstader gave her with his notes about her father’s powers. Elsewhere, the Sisters are cruising the town, working their way back to the mausoleum to mess with Julie, and smokin’ pot like every teen did back in the 80s.

Carol explains that she got the idea to mess with Julie this way from her brother. Her brother is in a fraternity who locked an initiate in the mausoleum and then doubled back and snuck in through a broken window to scare the guy off. Leslie doesn’t like the plan. When she speaks up, Carol tells her to beat cheeks and dumps her off on the side of the road. As Steve hunts for Julie around town, he stumbles upon Leslie. He learns from her the whole scheme with Carol and initiating Julie. This pisses Steve off somethin’ awful.

Meanwhile, back at the cemetery, Carol and Kitty have gotten snuck back in. They are first scared by a sleeping hobo, but eventually find the broken window in the mausoleum and use it to get inside. By the time they’ve gotten back to the cemetery, Raymar’s powers have grown quite a bit.

This will eventually spell doom for the two looking to mess with Julie. They find the room that Julie’s locked herself into. They use one of the pots on a tomb to smash it by the door of the room to wake her up. They then start calling her name in a spooky ghost voice. Before dropping her off, Kitty gave Julie a Demerol pill claiming it would help her sleep. Instead, the plan is for her to be stoned to the point that she can’t really think straight for when they mess with her. Sure enough, the broken vase, the creepy voices, the masks, and other props they’ve brought are really messing with her.

You know, One Dark Night is 100 minutes in length. That seems quite a bit longer (10-15 minutes longer) than most of the horror movies of the era. However, while I wouldn’t call it a slow burner of a movie, it does move at a decent pace. It’s well put together and I really do believe it’s a well-made movie. It’s also fairly well-acted too. It’s safe to say we know what to expect from the likes of a Meg Tilly, but everyone in this seems to be both taking it seriously and having fun.

Here’s what I like about it. Initially, you might think the B plot about the occult expert with the telekinesis powers and stuff isn’t connected directly to anything else. You might even share my opinion that either the A plot or the B plot was not enough for a movie of its own and required the addition of the other to fill out the full movie. They are also only very loosely connected. We know this lady’s dad might be up to dark magic shenanigans, but those shenanigans are going to catch these high schoolers in the collateral damage. We’ll get a third-act convergence of the two plots. Don’t worry.

What I appreciate about the movie’s pace is that everything is building appropriately. We are with Julie as Raymar is starting to bust out of his tomb. We’re with Olivia as she is learning the extent of Raymar’s dabbling in the dark arts. We’re with Steve as he is intelligently going from place to place to try to find Julie. We’re with the Sisters to see Leslie start to lose her confidence in Carol. It all feels like it’s building appropriately to give us something more to chew on while the horror slowly ramps up to that third act when things are going to go off the rails with reanimated corpses and the bad guy busting out of his tomb and what have you.

If you can’t tell… I like this movie a lot.

Alright, so we’re pretty much to that third act. Olivia, based on Dockstader’s taped notes, believes that she likely possesses some of the same powers her father does. Based on this, and the concerns of what it could mean for Raymar to come back to life, she rushes to the mausoleum. Steve, armed with the info from Leslie, is on his way to save Julie. Carol and Kitty find Raymar’s tomb and Carol knows who this guy is. She knows about the supposed telekinetic powers, but mostly she knows about his murder rap.

Because this is the 80s, Carol and Kitty decide to finish their joint which is the last thing they do before Raymar’s powers start to really kick into high gear. He begins shaking everything around his tomb and throwing chairs from the funeral against the wall. He finally smashes through his tomb and starts throwing stuff around with his powers as a red light emanates from his tomb. To rid the movie of Carol and Kitty, he does something much more devious. For them, he decides to more or less terrify them with corpses from the coffins inside the tombs… and these corpses are gross and gooey too.

This is a wonderful moment in this movie. It’s maybe THE great moment of this movie. It’s all about the pacing and the acting by Robin Evans (Carol) and Leslie Speights (Kitty). While Olivia is using her newly understood psychic powers to peer into the mausoleum, Raymar makes a single coffin bust out of its tomb and slowly slide out. Once it slowly touches down onto the floor and remains propped up, the girls cower on the opposite wall. Then, they watch as the coffin slowly spins to face the girls and then opens to show the gooey corpse inside. Then the corpse opens his eyes. It’s done in this slow way. It’s not a jump scare, but it’s effective. The two girls are petrified and you feel it too. It’s a good reveal that we’re not just going to have a guy who somehow figured out how to suck the lifeforce from people to ultimately obtain immortality through dark occult shit. No… We’ve got ghouls and (sorta) zombies now too.

Their end comes with Raymar himself finally slides his coffin outside his tomb and reveals himself as a shriveled-up monster man with Palpy eyes.

It’s not technically Raymar who kills Carol and Kitty. No, he does more of that trick where he slides out more of those coffins from their tombs. This is happening all over the mausoleum. So when the girls run away, they keep running into corpses that Raymar is controlling with his telekinesis. The girls eventually think they’ve gotten away, but, no. They are soon caught by corpses who eventually pile up on the girls and suffocate them to death.

This is all a wonderful sequence and totally pays off the whole threat of Raymar.

Steve has gotten into the mausoleum but he has not seen any of the spooky stuff. The door to the room that Julie had made her bedroom earlier and her hiding place now opens. A dazed and stoned Julie kind of stumbles out of the room but is soon aware of what Raymar is doing and tries running away. Luckily, she runs into Steve who tries to tell her that it was Carol and Kitty who did everything she’s seen and heard tonight. Just as he convinces her of this and they plan to get out, they run right into Raymar’s army of reanimated corpses.

They are forced into the hall where Raymar’s tomb is. Steve is bum-rushed by the corpses while Raymar dazes Julie and starts pulling her toward him with his mind powers. Steve tries fighting his way through the corpses but they knock him out. Raymar is going to try to steal her lifeforce, but Olivia arrives to tell him to back off. He knocks Olivia to the ground and as her purse falls to the floor, her compact slides out which gives her an idea…

She steps toward her father and tells him she doesn’t fear the psychic vampire. She takes his hand off Julie’s head and stands in her place. However, that doesn’t really work and she’s knocked back. He tries pulling Julie back to him but Olivia uses the mirror in her compact to reflect his Palpatine powers back at him. This causes his body to melt and he and his telekinesis-controlled corpses collapse and wither away.

This is one of those moments while writing this blog that I really love the fact that I do write this blog. I doubt there would ever be another scenario in my everyday life in which I would type “This causes his body to melt and he and his telekinesis-controlled corpses collapse and wither away.” I doubt I could send an email to my boss and explain how I handled something and use that as a summation.

Anyway, let’s face it… Julie’s gonna need therapy. BIG TIME. However, that’s not to say this isn’t an excellent little chiller. It’s not the typical 80s horror film. There are only two actual deaths that we see in the movie. Sure, there are dozens of bodies, but only two people die on screen, Carol and Kitty. It’s a movie that exists and satisfies on the vibes. It takes something that hands out the jibblies on a universal level, being stuck in a mausoleum and unable to get out, and lets the movie build from there. It’s not gory. It’s not got boobs. It doesn’t have too many bad words. In fact, it’s PG-rated.

Again, what it does is use things people, particularly high schoolers, would do to kind of creep each other out and uses that as the premise. Kids constantly think about creeping each other out by pulling pranks. We always try to spook our friends out with campfire tales or stories we heard about these ghastly scenarios in murders. We don’t like places where people are buried. These are simplistic things that are almost universal for young people to scare themselves with.

Reviews over the years have been mixed on One Dark Night. Those who like it, really like it. Those who don’t are just kind of lukewarm on going up against it by just saying it’s kind of lame. That’s fair. If you like really gory or really hard-edged R-rated stuff like torture porn, this ain’t gonna do it for you unless you have baked-in nostalgia from seeing it as a kid.

Some reviews also say that maybe it’s better as a short, no more than 30 minutes or so. Yeah, I could see this being a tight episode of Tales from the Darkside or something. I particularly think the stuff with the Sisters would go over well for something like that. The stuff with the older cast members might be best for something like Night Gallery. I could see it in that shorter form being really tense.

Regardless, I still like this movie quite a bit.

That does it for this week. Next Friday, we’re once more stepping away from horror for something to really get the 80s nostalgia cooking in the minds of Gen-X Enemaniacs out there. Join me for Gleaming the Cube starring Christian Slater! But that’s not all either! Tomorrow is the triumphant return of B-Movie Enema: The Series! Tomorrow at 6pm on OtherWorlds TV on Roku, or 7pm on the B-Movie Enema YouTube channel, or 7:30pm right here on the website, tune in to watch me and Nurse Disembaudee host the 1973 vampire chiller Hannah, Queen of the Vampires!

Check it out, won’t you?