Frank Hawes gets the joke. Do you?
End shot of the film 'Alone In The Dark' 1982 directed by Jack Shoulder and starring Jack Palance.
Jack Shoulders films are and have been hit and miss, but in this little known horror suspense film he created a gem. Not least because of his amazing cast of Hollywood veterans including Martin Landau and Donald Pleascence. A young Dwight Schultz plays a relocating psychiatrist , a casting that carries an ironic prescience, since a year later he would star in the hit eighties show The A-Team. Starring as Lieutenant 'Mad' Murdoch an often institutionalised pilot.
The films basic plot is about four insane killers who , when their regular psychiatrist moves hospitals, dream up a delusion that he has been murdered by the new doctor (Schultz). They take it upon themselves to kill this new doctor in revenge and lay siege to his house.
Hidden Narrative.- in edit.
The film has a hidden narrative that satirises and explores the nature of madness and social conditioning. We are given the madness of religion (Landau) , the madness of sexual desire (the molester), madness of war (Palance)- versus the reasoning of the doctors. The club Palance ends up in the end seems like bedlam, he is rewarded with applause when he beats up the doorman. The youth seem drug addled, not connected to our version of sanity. They live in a world of nuclear war and accidents (a nuclear power plant accident that shuts all the local power down aids the patients escape). The doctors sister, herself a former mental patient demonstrates against nuclear war. The locals riot in a crazy fashion when the electric is down- so much for civilisation.
-Re-write this and edit in a few pics.
