One Dark Night

I watched this for one simple reason: it was directed by Tom McLoughlin, who directed one of the best Friday The 13th movies. Friday The 13th Part 6 is a whip-smart movie with fantastic pacing, fun characters, a delicious gothic atmosphere, and an overall style and feeling that stands out from the rest of the series. I figured if he could bring that to Jason Voorhees, what could he do on his own? Without the restraints of fitting into a known franchise, he had to make magic. As it turns out, he did not. One Dark Night shows none of the flair and prowess and cleverness of Jason Lives. Inventiveness, yes; this is one nutty concept. But it's also dull, populated with paper doll characters, and a broken sense of pacing. The plot summary, such as one could summarize this, goes like this: a Russian psychic dies under mysterious circumstances (and also surrounded by several dead girls). It turns out he was using his psychic powers to drain them of their life force. He is interred at a local mausoleum, the same building where Meg Tilly is challenged with spending the night if she wants to get into a high school clique. That clique then breaks in to terrorize Tilly's character, while the dead Russian psychic plots to puppeteer the corpses in an effort to do something that is unclear. And the Russian psychic's daughter is trying to untangle who her dad was, what he did, and what he may be up to now, aside from being dead. Got all that? It sounds like a lot on paper, but in practice, it ends up being a slog. The movie isn't even 90 minutes with credits, and yet it still manages to spend over 60 minutes of it on set-up. When it finally gets to the climax -- which has some fantastic corpse design -- it wants to be crazier than it is. The corpses float around, bumping into people like slow-motion hockey players, but they don't actually do anything. Why does the Russian psychic attack the two girls from the clique with corpses but wants to drain Tilly's character? What does he hope to accomplish, considering he's dead? Not explained. Not even hinted at. And if you're hoping for some gory kills to spice things up, look somewhere else. If it could be said to have any kills (that's disputable), they're so lame, they're worse than off-screen deaths. I'll give it points for the atmosphere, as a mausoleum is always a solid setting for a horror movie. Tilly does a fine job as the damsel in distress, even if she's pretty ineffectual to the events around her. Fortunately, so is the boyfriend, so at least there's that. And, as said before, the make-up and prop design for the corpses is excellent. But the first two acts of this movie are an absolute drag, and the third doesn't go hard enough to justify the wait. If you're hoping to see more of the magic McLoughlin brought to Jason Voorhees, you won't find it in One Dark Night.