The Town That Dreaded Sundown

Helen_S2.5

That empty feeling when you've waited decades to see a film and then are counting down the minutes for it to end :(

Ian West4.0

The Town that Dreaded Sundown had eluded me for many years during the 90’s and 2000’s, with the empty VHS box at the video store acting as a place holder until it was returned... except some clown never returned it and (along with some 90’s Fangoria coverage) the amazing box cover art continued to haunt my curiousity with its ‘IN 1946 THIS MAN KILLED FIVE PEOPLE...TODAY HE STILL LURKS THE STREETS OF TEXARKANA’ catch phrase long after the VHS tapes switched to DVD’s and the eventual closing of family owned rental establishments. Years later I was beyond excited when the Scream Factory blu came out and by that time I knew all about ‘Texarkana Moonlight Murders’ and the ‘Phantom Killer’. So I scooped the blu and ended up watching it on a sweltering hot summer day.... A/C was down, windows were open, crickets were cricketing, and the ice in my Whiskey on the rocks was rattling as Mr. Pierce’s grindhouse drive-in cult jam very much lived up to my near 20 year fascination with the box cover art. Tonally, The Town that Dreaded Sundown is all over the place... mixing true crime, elements of film noir, and oddball goofy slapstick/bumbling cop stuff, all framed with documentary style characteristics and narration... those ingredients effectively made scenes of suffocatingly grim violence a legitimate shock... like getting yanked out of your car and dragged through the woods before being stabbed to death with a fucking trombone featuring a knife taped to it 😳I can most certainly see people not jiving with the all over the place tonal aspects, but folks... it most certainly works for me. I’ve really taken to this woodland stalk and slash cult jam over the years and I’ve even been fortunate enough to catch it at a drive-in which was a real treat... and I can’t leave out the fact that the Phantom Killer is my very favorite looking movie boogeymen. In my eyes, The Town that Dreaded Sundown is most definitely a bridge between movies like Black Christmas or Texas Chain Saw Massacre ‘based on a true story’ murder jams of the 70’s and the slasher craze jettisoned by Halloween—hitting its full swing just few short years laterI’ve also never been able to look at a trombone the same way ever since. I love this movie (and it’s sequel/remake from 2014)

Josh Lewis3.0

Gonna give this one the light pass for the genuinely very good and creepy murder setpieces which are a harrowing combo of procedural docudrama recreation and blunt proto-slasher brutality complete with the heavy breathing, POV voyeur-stalker imagery, and entire lengthy scenes of bloody victims just being dragged around screaming by a motiveless killer in a mask. It's pretty wild, cold-blooded stuff for 1976 and I think this would be remembered a lot more fondly if it had more of the Southern Gothic horror-melodrama atmosphere suggested by the material and marketing to go along with them. (You can see the better Zodiac meets Friday the 13 movie in here just begging to jump out.) But man, all the bumbling Smokey and the Bandit/Dukes of Hazard Texas Ranger hijinks shit (and honestly pretty relaxed/redundant THIS IS BASED ON A TRUE STORY voice-over and chintzy old-timer music choices) that these sequences are structured around is baffling and only serves to intermittently drain the movie of the mood or urgency it builds in its scares. Anyone familiar with the real history here, that trombone kill is made up, right? It's such a ridiculous bad-taste genre shock that comes out of nowhere right in the middle of a scene that otherwise reads like an attempt at grim authenticity. Kinda liked it anyway it was just weird and funny.