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The Town That Dreaded Sundown
(1977)
Reviewed By Fistula
Genre: "Based On True Events" Masked Killer Southern Fried Scare Flick
Director: Charles "The Legend of Boggy Creek" Pierce
Writer: Earl "Sudden Impact" Smith
Featuring: Ben "Terror Train" Johnson
& Andrew "ELiminators" Prine
Review______________
Fo schnizzle my nizzles! Mad props to j’all peeps digging tha’ 411 on the main event of my Back 2 Da Hood reviews. Seriously, that’s enough of that, I’m not even entirely sure what I just said. Please don’t leave.
Sorry to disappoint anybody out there that’s crazy/stupid/insane/seriously bombed to be looking for reviews of any movies with the words “Leprechaun” and “Hood” in them, but the movie in question here is The Town That Dreaded Sundown, one of my personal faves and a glowing outlier to the “movies based on true stories suck” rule of thumb. It’s also another one – though easily the best – of Charles B. Pierce’s disturbingly vivid cinematic depictions of the Deep South, as us folks from the deep north assume it really is.
Sundown is a sort-of documentary of the famous Texarkana Moonlight Murder scandal that dawned in 1946. The movie, with a few glaring exceptions, doesn’t stray too far from the path of what supposedly happened back then. Sorry history buffalos, but I’m going to concentrate on the movie for the most part here, as I’m no historian and the less I know about the Deep South the better. If you want the true story, just search under “Texarkana Moonlight Murders” for a delicious history buffet of meaty, maybe-factual records of Texarkana’s own Phantom Killer who, maybe, just maybe, inspired our own president George W. Bush to kill as many people as many southerners as he can get his hands on. Hunker down for The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
Our story begins on a lovers’ lane road deep in the stinky bowels of Arkansas, or Texas or both, where clean-cut, white bread bland youths Sammy Fuller and Emma Lou Cook are working their way around to making out. As Sammy tries desperately to drag sex, or whatever the kids were into back then, out of Emma Lou, she hears something. Faster than you can say “hook hanging from the door handle,” (which isn’t really that fast, now that I’ve typed it) a hooded man pops the hood of the car, rips something wiry out and proceeds to drag Sammy out of the car and beat the living crap out of him. Luckily, his character was uninteresting and it doesn’t really matter. The man behind the mask proceeds to do the same to Emma Lou, though he leaves both clinging to life.
From here, we’re introduced to the plucky, yet completely ineffective, police staff of Texarkana. Unfortunately, they are all painfully southern, which is a big hit to their likeability. Unlike other masked killer movies like the Halloween and Friday the 13th series’, the cameras stick close to the cops, like an episode of “Dragnet” or “Adam 12”. While this is a turnoff for you gore whores out there, I’m a lifelong “Dragnet” fan and I dig this immensely. Now if only they could have gotten Jack Webb instead of this stable of Charles B. Pierce lifers. Sadly, this includes Pierce himself, who butchers scene after scene with terrible comic relief. Truly, Pierce’s antics as Patrolman A.C. “Spark Plug” Benson, along with like idiocy from the smelly mountain men he insists on casting, are the worst part of the whole movie. Sadly, it could have all been easily avoided. It’s like willingly replacing the warriors of Gondor or some other battle scene in Lord of the Rings with cast of “F Troop”. Yet, it’s not nearly as inappropriate or confusing as the comic relief in Last House of the Left, but more on that another time.
After the Texarkana police, led by Deputy Norman Ramsey, get nothing out of the beaten lovers, they forget about it for three weeks. That’s when Ramsey finds a pair of smoochers shot dead on a lonely road. He even sees the killer in the distance but, even with a 12-gauge shotgun, he’s out of range. The killer is dubbed the Phantom, for his ability to kill, elude the dim-bulb police force and disappear for three weeks at a time. The police throw up their hands, wet their pants and beg for help from the Texas Rangers. They get the best in Capt. J.D. Morales. The Morales character, played well by Ben Johnson, was based on a real life colorful Texas Ranger known for always getting his man and holding colorful press conferences. He runs the investigation like Nick Saban runs the Miami Dolphins, except no so stoically and, as we’ll find out later, not so successfully.
The rest of the movie is pretty much as follows: Morales, Ramsey and annoying driver Benson chase down a lead, usually somebody claiming to be the Phantom but isn’t really. Benson does something stupid (tick…tick…tick… we’re supposed to be laughing, I guess, but each joke ends with a thud and the sound of crickets chirping outside my window). Sprinkle in some occasional Phantom murders, the police come up with an ineffective plan, shampoo, rinse and repeat.
Judging from the ho-hum plot synopsis, you might get the impression that I don’t care for this movie. Or, you might have already noted that I said I like this movie and started dreaming of getting a high speed Kentucky Plow from Stephen Hawking (no dude, YOU’RE sick). But there are things in this movie that just stand out to me. Here are a few highlights:
The Phantom Killer, played by Bud Davis, is straightforward, intelligent and rather scary. Rather than falling for the cops’ traps, the Phantom easily dodges them and keeps them guessing. There are a couple of particularly scintillating attacks, namely one where he completely forgoes his lovers’ lane M.O. and attacks a couple in a remote farmhouse. This one – in which he shoots an unsuspecting husband in the back of the head, shoots his wife (played by the Professor Anne Mary Ann herself, Dawn Wells) in the face twice before she gets away – is pretty much a straight reenactment of one of the real-life murders and is far scarier than the Scream-esque elaborate murders that bog down most Hollywood horrors.
The documentary style works here, even if some events are embellished or even completely made up. The narrator, though overused a little, makes it feel like the plot is moving along when, in actuality, it has ground to a halt. Or maybe it was just me. It appeals to the “Dragnet” lover in me.
I dig the palpable sense of fear that spreads through the town. As someone who grew up in a small, though thankfully non-southern, town, the paranoia of small town living feels real. I felt the fear of the characters and I didn’t want them to just die, even though they were southern! Checking, checking, yep… first time ever.
Now, I turn my attention to the infamous “trombone killing” scene. It’s the one where the Phantom ties up his female victim, ties his knife to the end of her trombone and stabs her as he extends the slide (Dr. Freud, this means something but what?). This seems kind of goofy today, but I find it kind of disturbing in a way that it would really mess with me if it happened to someone I know. My logic is: it’s bad enough to have your girlfriend killed by a masked psycho, but do you really want him getting off on it too? Think about it, won’t you?
This brings me to my only other major gripe, aside from the completely unwanted comic relief from Pierce and his monkeys. According to the research I did on the real-life case, the real Phantom was also a sexual predator who raped or molested his victims. This is approached but not explored in the movie, other than in the made-up trombone scene – the origin of this part of the movie was probably that one of his victims was a saxophone player whose instrument was stolen and later found in a swamp. Not that I really wanted this movie to go all I Spit On Your Grave on me, but nothing chills my blood quite like a sexual predator. On a sidebar, I always thought that the biggest mistake the people behind the Nightmare on Elm St. series made was taking the sexual predator out of Freddy Krueger after the first movie. Thankfully, they resurrected that side of him in Freddy vs. Jason with, I think, terrifying results.
Because the real murders ended without definitive closure – the cops arrested a guy they think might have done it but many, including the true-life Capt. Morales, didn’t think it was him – the writers made up an ending that I rather liked, forgiving one major hole. Morales and Ramsey are driving around after more or less giving up when they spot a stolen car (this element is about the only factual part of the ending, they bagged the eventually-arrested guy when he follows a pattern of stealing a car, killing and getting rid of the car). There they see a guy wearing a white hood. Is it the killer? Well, he has a white hood on so hell yeah! Morales, who obviously subscribes to “Coleman Francis Law and Order Monthly” magazine, decides that wearing a non-distinguished white hood is grounds for frontier justice and takes a shot at the guy while he’s just standing there! He runs away, giving Morales further right to chase and shoot him. If only he had an airplane, this would be just like a Coleman Francis ending. The Phantom beats his pursuers around a moving train, but Morales shoots him in the leg as he tries to jump the train. From there, the wounded Phantom escapes into the swamplands of beautiful Arkansas, maybe to die but never to be seen again. Okay, so they made it up. I thought it was a strong ending that more than serves its purpose: to leave up the widely-held idea that the Phantom was never caught and continued to roam free, perhaps to continue killing.
For the true-crime lover, The Town That Dreaded Sundown has all the essentials that you probably want in a horror movie. It’s reasonably faithful to the true events, lingers on cops doing cop stuff seemingly forever and trudges through the story at a painstaking pace. Was it the best adaptation of the brutal Texarkana Moonlight Murders? Probably not. But the real story was just scary and just mysterious enough to make C- filmmaking into a B+ movie.
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