Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Michael Ledo The movie was simply bad and not even "best in bad" type of campy. The movie has a needless 1950's prologue and epilogue. But let's not stop there, how about some 50's soundtrack music. Break out Peter Gunn. William Devane plays a Steven King type of author whose daughter has been brutally murdered by the alien. He tore her head off, although we really don't get to see any blood or gore. The police are baffled in what turns out to be a serial killer known as the Mangler Zombie. Cathy Lee Crosby plays the late night blond TV newscaster, long before FOX required them all to get implants and wear shiny lip gloss. She ends up with William Devane in a lame seduction scene. Oh BTW there is no sex or nudity to go with the no blood and guts. How it got an "R" rating, I couldn't tell from the movie.There is also an elderly woman who plays a Jean Dixon type of person who sees the alien killing in the future of a young wanna-be movie star whose name she doesn't know. She is upset that the inept secular police don't take her seriously.The alien, we are told, kills to get stronger, although there was no way of telling. We really didn't know why there was one lone alien predator in California. When the alien attacked two things happened first: 1) The lights went out. 2) The alien had his own theme kill whisper music like Jason...daaaark...nessss. Oh and one more thing, the alien had frickin' laser beams shooting out of his eyes.The movie is borderline camp, which is not where you want to be.

user-1147 the dark is OK, a little boring in parts, but a good spell of deaths to make up for it. people in loss Angeles are being mutilated and it's up to a murdered woman's father and a reporter to track down the killer. just the same old laser beam death gets a little tedious, but there are a couple of exceptions, like a boy who gets thrown through a wall and a man who has his head torn off. there is good use of the dark, both outside and inside buildings. a couple of suspenseful scenes make this film a touch scarier. the ending scene is quite good, with a fight with the police and the murdered girls father saving the reporter by burning the creature. overall, the film is fairly good and the tedium of the film being the only downfall.

Ralphus2 With B-grade 70s/80s horror, like "The Dark", you never expect a cinematic masterpiece. You don't expect brilliant dialogue and pacing and Oscar-worthy acting. And it's just as well, because "The Dark" lives up to all lack of expectations.The dialogue is so pathetically cheesy. Lots of glib, snappy, clichéd lines; lines delivered for their 'that's what a hard-nosed cop says' value rather than their relevance to the context in which they occur. Notably the lines delivered by a hilariously cornball Richard Jaeckel as Mooney--especially when engaging with his constantly eating sidekick (another cops cliché).It's clear that this film was re-edited to make it something other than it was originally intended to be. The sequence of events, the way characters become involved suddenly, the appearance of certain characters in scenes where they don't really belong--at least not until later; it's all so amateurishly jumbled. And all is accompanied by a ridiculous "soundtrack" featuring some garbled Spanish-sounding words and a tacky, ominous "The Dark...nessss". Ridiculous! Cathy Lee Crosby brings all her plasticky bodaciousness to her role and William Devane (pre-jowls--although you can see the creases at the corners of his mouth that were soon to evolve into his most notable feature; surely those jowls are worthy of their own IMDb listing!) gives the best performance I've ever seen of an aging divorced hippie ex-convict-cum-crime novelist whose daughter has been beheaded by a mutant alien zombie mangler.Great B-grade fare! No. No, it isn't. It's awful!

NxNWRocks This movie deserves a higher IMDb rating than its current 3.4. Not THAT much higher, granted, but at least 4.5. Almost the entire cast turn in very solid performances, elevating the weak material just by taking everything entirely seriously. A good job was done on the photography, particularly the use of lighting (and, by definition, the shadows) in night scenes. The highest praise could be that the whole thing comes across as a feature-length Kolchak (the police chief even bears a vague resemblance to McGavin's character).The script has a couple of strong points. Devane's character's past gives him an added depth and a good basis for the tension between him and the detective character played by Richard Jaeckel. Some of the night scenes are genuinely suspenseful. On the downside, the plot has very little real development, almost nothing is properly explained, and the ending is both well-choreographed and...well, silly. Also, the whispering voice on the soundtrack detracts from the movie - it's never clear if the voice is supposedly to actually be occurring within the scene or not, so it would have been better to omit it altogether.If for no other reason, the well-publicized post-production change to the movie and Kasem's cameo are two items that make this a curio worth tracking down.