The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

The Town That Dreaded Sundown is one of the most infuriating horror movies ever made! It is the classic case of a hack director (Charles B. Pierce) taking a surefire premise and some how botching it. The Town That Dreaded Sundown has the makings of a classic horror movie - a genuinely scary villain (the hooded menace known as "The Phantom Killer"), a great setting (Texarkana, 1946), and even a few strong performances to boot - and, yet, Pierce manages to undermine it every step of the way. This is characteristic of most of Pierce's works; his most famous movie, The Legend of Boggy Creek, starts off as a compelling documentary on the Fouke Monster (a Bigfoot like beast the supposedly stalks Fouke, Arkansas), but is quickly done in by ponderous narrations, an overbearing blue grass soundtrack, and truly bad acting. There is a genuinely creepy scene in which the monster attacks a family in a trailer home, but the rest of the movie is pure schlock.

Pierce must have felt that his horror movie just might be too grim for audiences, so he decided to lightened the tone by shoe horning in as much comedy relief as possible; provided by the bumbling patrolman "Spark Plug" Benson (played by Pierce).  Unfortunately, the transition from horror to comedy is completely jarring - in the blink of an eye the movie goes from genuine terror to horrible comedy. There's even a lengthy car chase scene, with goofy music on the soundtrack, that is more befitting of Smokey and the Bandit than  a horror movie. Granted, humor isn't anything new to the horror genre; the Friday the 13th series are filled with comedic moments. However, the difference between the Friday the 13th series and The Town That Dreaded Sundown is that the humor in the former feels organic to the story, whereas it comes off as being extremely forced in the latter. When you get a group of teenagers together there is always going to be a few funny moments, but it seems out of place for the Texarkana police department to be in such good spirits, considering that their town is being terrorized by a serial killer.

The other major flaw of the movie is that it really lacks a strong central character; Ben Johnson is a fine actor and delivers a solid performance as Texas Ranger, J.D. Morales, but the character is too distant for an audience to truly empathize with, and is off screen for long portions of the movie; he first appears at about the thirty minute mark of the movie.  Deputy Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine) is, theoretically,  the movie's protagonist, but he lacks a personality and, essentially, gets shoved into the background once Morales enter the picture.  The most sympathetic character is Helen Reed, played by Dawn Wells of Gilligan's Island fame, where she played the "All American" Mary Ann. Reed is an average woman (she is first seen grocery shopping) that finds herself the target of a crazed killer; it's a truly terrifying scene. She is shot twice by the Phantom Killer, but manages to crawl out of her house and into a cornfield - this one of the movie's few effective scenes. The killer stalks Helen through the cornfield and we are genuinely afraid for her, hoping she will make it out alive. We breathe a sigh of relief when she finds refuge in a neighbor's house. It's an effective performance by Wells (effectively playing on her "All American Girl" image), but her role amounts to nothing more than a cameo - she has about, roughly, ten minutes of screen time.

There are a few scary moments in the movie; the aforementioned cornfield scene and, most notably, an extreme tense moment when the killer ties a pocket knife to a woman's trombone and then  "plays" her to death.

These are genuinely haunting moments, but Pierces diffuses the tension by cutting to a shot of "Spark Plug" Benson bumbling his way through scenery. In the hands of a more gifted filmmaker, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, might have been a classic, but with Charles B. Pierce at the helm, it is simply mediocre.

Credits

Cast: Ben Johnson (Captain J.D. Morales), Andrew Prine (Deputy Norman Ramsey), Dawn Wells (Helen Reed), Charles B. Pierce (Patrolman A.C. "Spark Plug" Benson), Jimmy Clem (Sgt. Mal Griffin), Jim Citty (Police Chief R.J. Sullivan), Robert Aquino (Sheriff Otis Baker), Cindy Butler (Peggy Loomis), Christine Ellsworth (Linda Mae Jenkins), Earl E. Smith (Dr. Kress), Steve Lyons (Roy Allen), Bud Davis (The Phantom Killer).

Director: Charles B. Pierce.
Screenplay: Earl E. Smith
Running Time: 90 min.