Living in the Tampa Bay area as a kid, I had three possibilities to watch horror movies on Saturday afternoons: Shock Theater, Creature Feature, and Commander USA’s Groovie Movies. Shock Theater was on the ABC affiliate and started with some psychedelic graphics accompanied by an ominous voice over. It was pretty simple and to the point, and a great introductory show for little kids like me who wanted desperately to watch horror movies without losing sleep later. While it wasn’t the most exciting way to spend the afternoon, I credit Shock Theater for educating me with what seemed like the entire Universal Pictures library.

After a couple of years watching Shock Theater, I finally managed to change the channel to start watching Creature Feature. This local show was hosted by Dr Paul Bearer – as played by the affable Dick Bennick – a crazy-eyed pall bearer who drove a hearse and had a creepy laugh. Before and after commercial breaks, Dr Paul Bearer would have short skits and discuss the movie – sometimes mocking, sometimes pointing out the good stuff. The movies shown were usually Hammer and Godzilla movies. While these movies weren’t exactly the most frightening movies ever seen, they were in color and appeared far more contemporary than the movies I was used to over at Shock Theater. Even better, unlike Shock Theater, Creature Feature usually showed two movies instead of one. And while that was great and all, eventually I didn’t find Dr Paul Bearer’s movies to be scary enough.

And this is how I discovered Commander USA’s Groovie Movies on USA.

For those who don’t remember USA in the Eighties, it certainly wasn’t known for being quality television. In fact, it seemed like they bought truckloads of the most fucked up horror movies at the cheapest prices possible, edited out the swear words and fogged out the boobies, and then aired them in the middle of the day for all the children in the world to watch. In fact, I’m pretty sure Commander USA’s lead-in was The Smurfs.

It was glorious television.

Jim Hendricks played Commander USA, a sardonic middle-aged, cigar chomping superhero. In some ways he was a cross between Schneider from One Day at a Time and the Comedian from Watchmen – only cooler. And despite his humor and levity, there was something really sinister about the movies he presented. Even as a kid, I felt like I shouldn’t be watching half of the movies he showed, not only because some were legitimately frightening, but because they felt inappropriate. Commander USA movies felt like the movies that were on the top shelf in the horror section at the video store; you know, the ones in the oversized box with warnings all over the cover and a sticker telling you how many countries the movie was banned in.

Which brings me to Alone in the Dark, a movie that Commander USA seemed to show once every 3 months, and naturally, I was made to watch once every 3 months. This 1982 movie was directed by Jack Sholder (The Hidden) and starred Dwight Schultz, Martin Landeau, Jack Palance and Donald Pleasance. Schultz plays Dr Dan Potter, a psychiatrist who starts working at an unusual mental health facility run by an unorthodox and new age Dr Leo Bain (Pleasance). In one section of the facility is housed a group of psychopaths, including Preacher (Landau) and Hawkes (Palance), who establish in their own paranoid logic that Potter must have killed their previous and well-liked doctor, who decided to take a better job somewhere else. Add in a strangler, a child-killer, and a convenient blackout which gives the psychopaths the opportunity to escape from the facility and wander over to Potter’s house to terrorize the good doctor and his family, and what you have is a fairly interesting horror movie.

As a kid, Alone in the Dark was a fast paced and powerful horror movie…no, it was an experience. I particularly enjoyed the casting. First off, you had Palance playing a no-nonsense psychopath, all buff and serious, nothing like the black-humored host of Ripley’s Believe it…or Not. Then you had Pleasance playing an alternate universe version of Dr Loomis from Halloween where instead of meeting Michael Meyers, he discovered a large bag of mushrooms and never looked back. And then there’s Schultz playing the square and cowardly doctor who is nothing like Howling Mad Murdock from The A-Team. The whole movie played against type for me. Sadly, the film’s biggest victim is Landeau who has nothing to do except look creepy. For an actor who was capable of so much more, the paper-thinness of his character was bothersome.

As the adult who watched Alone in the Dark last week, I was amazed at how slow it was, and how though the movie didn’t have a message, it certainly believed it did. There seems to be a lot of hinting at the modern perception of madness and the notion that, in our own way, we are all crazy, and yet, it all fizzles to make room for a bloody death or punk music. The only character with any real substance is Palance’s Hawkes, and the ideas his character are supposed to represent are clearly hinted at throughout the film – especially in the film’s ending – without actually amounting to anything substantial. It makes me wonder if there’s not a longer cut of the movie out there where Hawkes’ character arch is better explained. Or perhaps I’m giving the movie too much credit, because Alone in the Dark certainly feels smart, especially when compared to most of the horror movies coming out during this time.

Still, there’s a lot to like. There’s a nice but too coincidental twist – though telegraphed by process of elimination – involving the strangler who has nosebleeds every time he kills. There is the unnecessary subplot involving Potter’s sister who suffers from extreme anxiety attacks that creates the movie’s most terrifying moment by completely cheating on the movie’s format and introducing, I believe, a zombie. There is the anti-Loomis scene where Bain tries to use peace, love and understanding to get the psychopaths to end their terror. And then there is the bizarre ending at a punk club where Hawkes’ ambiguous fate is revealed.

More importantly, despite how dated the movie looks, it holds up nicely since I last saw it, which is something I can’t say for about 80% of the movies I loved growing up. For instance, Never Ending Story, despite what nine year old me says, is absolutely terrible, and don’t get me started on Superman III. So I guess I owe good old Commander USA a big thank you. Without him, I’d never be happily frightened on a Saturday afternoon all those years ago, and I wouldn’t have the opportunity to relive the experience again twenty years later without feeling empty and disappointed, like a George Lucas movie or my elementary school yearbook.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Editorials, Features, Movies, Reviews, Too Soon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.