The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Just as I went into Antichrist prepared to hate it, I went into The Town that Dreaded Sundown prepared to love it. I was cruising through Netflix (this is truly how I imagine my movie-watching life—I am quite literally cruising through the digital kingdom of Netflix in a convertible, perhaps with a scarf in my hair? I don’t really imagine this.) when I saw the cover art and decided that it was actually my new favorite movie of all time and I had never even seen it.

Look at that. Look at it! It’s perfect. It’s everything I want in a movie.

That is a promotional poster for the movie; the Netflix cover art is the same image but is missing the ominous words at the top and the film information at the bottom. You can see how this would be extremely attractive to me: the frightening-but-obviously-low-budget figure looming out of scale over the town, the use of dusk imagery, the unnecessary quotation marks because I am quite sure that is the title of the movie without needing the punctuation, just everything. It is truly nothing short of perfection.

The movie itself is certainly short of perfection but enjoyable nonetheless. It’s set in 1946 Texarkana, a town on the Texas/Arkansas border which, boy howdy, sounds like an absolutely terrible place to live. It is most definitely a terrible place to live in the spring of that year when cars parked on lovers' lanes are being randomly attacked by an unknown hooded assailant.

The first assault takes place in the opening scenes of the film. It seems like your fairly average maniac-attacks-teens-in-a-parked-car scene but I became aware that I was clenching my fists like I was really anxious. Then I realized that there was no soundtrack or effects or anything—it was just the sound of a woman screaming over and over and over into an otherwise silent backdrop, which was really unnerving. I thought, “oh man, this movie is going to be super scary!”

I was wrong. Eventually I came to realize that the lack of a soundtrack in that scene was most likely a production mistake as opposed to a conscious atmospheric choice because several scenes later, our strong sensitive police deputy is chasing the bad guy in what we are told to believe is a rainy night setting, but half of the cuts in the scene are to broad daylight, sunny and clear. He even uses a flashlight during the daylight cuts! Seriously, you couldn’t have waited eight hours to shoot this 45 seconds of footage? I mean, I guess not. They don't even try to hide it.

The police in this movie are dumb as a bag of hammers, they really are. The deputy reports to the sheriff, who has about six lines in the movie. Two of these lines were so good I felt compelled to write them down: “Captain, we ain’t got nothin’!” and “We haven’t been able to come up with a damn thing!” so that gives you a pretty good idea of his worth. Because he’s so useless, they bring in the most famous Texas Ranger in all the land who, spoiler alert, is also pretty useless. In fact, the middle hour of this film is basically a police procedural which is kind of insane because they don’t collect a single shred of evidence. Not one.

“Wow,” you must be thinking to yourself. “This killer must be good. He must be really good at covering his tracks.” NOPE. Well, the police seem to think so. In fact, the Famous Ranger says to the deputy, “This guy doesn’t make any mistakes!” except that uh, yes, he does. Ultimately he attacks eight people and kills five. That’s a 62.5% kill rate. He leaves more than 1/3 of his victims alive. He is also seen by police on two separate occasions, though they are unable to stop him. These are not the traits of a killer who is uncatchable AND YET, the police are unable to find any sort of clues to point them in any direction whatsoever. We are supposed to be identifying with the police, but they are portrayed as a bunch of bumbling morons. The film also weirdly devotes a total of about 25 minutes to comic relief in the form of a cop called Sparkplug, played by the director. Five full minutes are devoted to Sparkplug losing a set of car keys. There are some weird choices.

The killer himself is fairly frightening—a hulking man with a sack over his head, peering through crudely-cut eyeholes. My only real beef with him is that, through another strange directorial or acting choice, he is constantly doing this labored, heavy breathing into the sack in such a way that he’s sucking the fabric into and out of his mouth and it’s SO weird and distracting. I kept worrying that he was going to suffocate.

I made a gif, I think I can retire from this blog now. 

I can’t believe I am this deep into this review and I have yet to mention that Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island is in this movie and she is great. It’s a shame that Dawn Wells was probably so well-known for that wholesome television role that I imagine it was difficult for her to get other work, because she could have had a career as a scream queen—I really thought she did a nice job in her few minutes of camera time in which she screams a bunch, gets shot in the face twice, cries, rolls around in the dirt, falls down, etc. Probably not how she imagined life off the island, huh? Man, that was a joke so bad I feel compelled to leave it in here to shame myself.

Mary Ann is not the only great thing about The Town that Dreaded Sundown, though. I have to say, this movie had one of my favorite kills in all the movies I’ve reviewed here so far: the Phantom Killer, as he comes to be known, has captured a high school couple immediately after the prom, and the young lady happened to be the trombone player in the band. After tying her up with her arms around the trunk of a tree, the killer fastens a knife to the end of the slide on the trombone and repeatedly stabs her. It’s sort of a hilarious scene, though, because he doesn’t just stab her with the end of the slide—he puts the brass mouthpiece up to his mask as though he’s playing the trombone even though there’s no mouth-hole in the sack and it's totally unnecessary. It’s wonderful.

I didn’t know until I did some research after watching The Town that Dreaded Sundown that it was based on a true story (I know, they are all based on a true story) but this one actually stuck fairly closely to the real life events of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, including the bit about several victims being left alive. I definitely went down the internet rabbit hole reading about the actual crimes of the Texarkana phantom and man, they were pretty brutal. That brings me to my next point:

I also didn't know that this film was just remade and that the remake is just about to be released (or was just recently released, I'm unclear), which was probably why it just popped up on Netflix. This particular remake was apparently conceived and produced by Ryan Murphy, the co-creator of 'American Horror Story', so I am guessing that any degree of subtlety that was exercised in the 1976 original will be off the table entirely. Given how much I liked this version and how much I guiltily enjoy AHS, I’ll probably check out the reboot when I have an opportunity. 

The Town that Dreaded Sundown: not my new favorite as expected by the cover art, but definitely not a letdown! Would recommend.

Halloween (1978)

Hi, remember me?? I used to write this blog where I watched horror movies and then reviewed them via crappy MS Paint drawings? Well, then winter happened and I warded off the crippling depression by mainlining episodes of both the hilarious bad movie podcast How Did This Get Made? and the hilarious bad movie television show Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I just felt like everyone was doing a better job with movie commentary than I was. Today I was listening to an old episode of another excellent podcast, Judge John Hodgman, in which a guy was attempting to compile a list of his top 100 horror films of all time and I thought to myself, “Hey, I should do some kind of project involving horror films! Maybe I can even put my rarely-used journalism degree to work,” then I remembered that I’m still paying for this URL.

So here we are, time to pick up this project again. I don’t want you to be alarmed but since I stopped drawing egotistical portraits of myself for this blog last fall, I grew my hair out and stopped flat-ironing it, so please accept this new egotistical portrait of myself.



Glenn still looks the same/is still a shithead.

Since this blog is obvs all about me, I wanted to do a movie that holds particular importance to me to revive it. I went with one of my all-time favorites: Halloween. I mentioned in the previous entry that I bought a VHS copy of Halloween at a Blockbuster sale and it really changed me. When I say that it changed me, I mean that it ruined me deep inside and made me unable to feel real love and real empathy. Michael Myers is that good.

 I recently watched a documentary about the making of Halloween that included a bit of trivia about how the movie was originally presented to studio execs without the iconic music and it really wasn’t terribly scary at all. John Carpenter composed and overlaid the chilling score (it’s in 5/4! Great time signature.) and the movie itself became the truly terrifying work it is. It’s perfect. In homage to this, I would like you to please hit play on the following video and listen to the score while you read this post. It’s only 2:36 though, so, you know… scroll quickly.

 Is this one of the scariest films of all time? My personal feeling is that it’s certainly in my top five, and you could argue that it really spawned the aesthetic of the stalking killers in the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises as well. If nothing else, it gave us the “virgins will live!” trope which I hold so near and dear to my heart. If you know me in real life, you know that despite the fact that I am happily married, I am abstaining from such lewd activities just in case I am ever forced to subvert a malevolent force of some kind. It’s just an investment in my future. I’m not trying to die.

Michael Myers’ now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t appearances as he stalks our protagonist (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut) are just one of the ways Carpenter built fear and suspense and paranoia throughout the second act. My favorite of these moments is one of his first appearances in Haddonfield:



Okay, so this is weird. I drew that picture from my memory of the scene and then thought I should google it to see if I was anywhere near the likeness I was aiming for. This is a still from the original scene:


I know the first thing you noticed was my completely implausible perspective (I also have a degree in art history, which means that I can easily recognize my errors but feel no real compulsion to correct them) but otherwise, look how close that is! That’s a testament to the power of this movie—that image is completely stuck in my brain and probably will be forever. (It is close, right? Tell me it’s close. TELL ME I’M AN ARTIST.)

That’s not, however, my favorite moment of the movie. That comes in the third act, when Michael Myers has begun his assault on the misbehaving teens and (spoiler alert) kills Bob, the boyfriend of promiscuous Linda (spoiler alert 2: boobs in this scene) who wears those sort of creepy/molesty late 1970s tortoiseshell eyeglasses that were also worn by at least one of your weird uncles when you were a kid. Michael Myers appears in the doorway of the bedroom, dressed as a ghost in a sheet but wearing Bob’s glasses over the eye holes and of course, proceeds to brutally murder Linda. The point of Michael Myers is that he’s completely unrelatable—a psychotic and inhumane monster—and yet he does this thing that’s actually sort of funny for the audience, even though the end result is the death of a chesty protagonist.


I don’t want to say too much about this movie because 1) if you’ve never seen it, why are you even reading this blog? Go watch it immediately; and 2) if you have seen it, you probably love it and know it pretty damn well so why would I bother describing it to you? The third act continues in all its eerie glory and climaxes into one of my favorite endings in horror history—an ending that kept me up at night. It leads perfectly into the sequel, which starts off strong and then really kind of gets lost in the middle if my memory serves me correctly –but let’s not get too far into that now so I can review it later.

Hey guys! I wrote a recap! I drew some MS Paint pictures! Here’s to hoping I can keep it up. One thing that’s certainly motivating to me is that Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the namesake of this blog, is running at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room from August 22-30 and I CANNOT WAIT to see it on the big screen. For more info, go here and please support your local arts organizations.