The “stupefyingly boring” thriller Roger Ebert called the measuring stick for bad movies
To be a film critic, you have to be comfortable with being absolutely ruthless, because sometimes a film is so terrible that sugarcoating its merits would only be an insult to your reader.
Luckily, Roger Ebert had no qualms with writing the most brutally honest reviews during his decades-long tenure as one of America’s leading critics.
He wasn’t afraid to call out films for being terrible, because cinema is a serious art form after all; you can’t be going around making offensively bad movies and not face repercussions. Over the years, Ebert at times dished out his opinions with the cutthroat nature of Gordon Ramsay, although his appreciation for and knowledge of cinema was much more like Anthony Bourdain. Ebert took his job seriously.
So, with thousands of movies watched and probably just as many given a write-up, Ebert was pretty well-equipped when it came to assessing what made a film good – and what made one absolutely awful. Many films felt his wrath during his lifetime, but some he held as benchmarks for the worst of their genres, like The Dark, a thriller he believed to be so bad that he insulted it from every angle.
“This is without a doubt the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years,” he wrote. “It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark“.
Released in 1979, The Dark landed right as horror was booming off the back of hits like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and Alien. But unlike those classics, John Cardos’ sci-fi horror flick was all over the shop – the plot wandered aimlessly, never really going anywhere. Roger Ebert? He was absolutely bored stiff.
Awarding it just one and a half stars, Ebert continued, “One of the amazing things about The Dark is that it’s only about 85 minutes long – short for a feature film, if more than long enough for this one. If they’d gone all the way and shot for 120 minutes, they might have qualified for the most stupefyingly boring movie ever made. Maybe they win that one anyway.”
The movie was actually going to be directed by Tobe Hooper, but he was eventually replaced by Cardos, who clearly didn’t have the filmmaking abilities to make The Dark work. You see, if Hooper had been in charge, then maybe we would’ve gotten a movie on the same level as his magnum opus, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but instead it emerged as a piece of horror slop, a failure on all fronts.
The strange creature responsible for murdering his victims in the film is a corny laser-shooting serial killer, and Ebert was not impressed. “The creature’s favorite means of attack is to pull off his victim’s heads. Wonderful. The press nicknames him ‘The Mangler,’ a title that could more accurately be bestowed on the director,” he wrote.
The Dark reflected the less prosperous side of horror during the late 1970s, and Ebert evidently wanted nothing to do with it.
