The Town That Dreaded Spark Plug

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Seems downright obscene that I hadn't seen the 1976 true-story slasher The Town That Dreaded Sundown until this weekend, but the problem can probably be pin-pointed to two things. One: it's impossible to find - it's never been released onto DVD and the VHS-quality copies on the internet are pretty shoddy-looking. Thankfully TCM aired the film - and a beautifully pristine copy at that - last week. And two: how very much I disliked the experience of watching the director Charles B. Pierce's previous low-budget pseudo-doc horror flick The Legend of Boggy Creek. God that movie annoyed me. But it's a shame I was put off for so long, because what works in The Town That Dreaded Sundown works incredibly well. 

And lucky for us, what works is all the scary stuff. The stalking and killing scenes are genuinely terrifying - I'm a sucker for a bag-head killer, and the Phantom Killer (as he was called in the real world case this film's based on) is a total creeper. He's got the scary wild eyes peering out from inside the bag that are given, but he adds a dash of hyperventilating, sucking the bag in and out at a furious rhythm, that pushes it over into even more unsettling territory. And these scenes are shot beautifully, lighting up the middle-of-nowhere forests just enough to show us all we don't want to see. The seemingly amateur (except for Gilligan's Island's own Mary Ann, aka Dawn Wells!) actors sell their fright really well in ways that don't feel redundant to these sorts of scenes that I've seen before, which gives them an honesty that's... discomfiting, to put it mildly. And holy hell, that trombone.

But. Those scenes amount to a little bit less than half the movie's runtime. The rest of the movie is an inexplicable Hee Haw episode, with banjos twanging while a slack-jawed yokel cop named Spark Plug dresses up in lady clothes to get his fake tits honked and then falls into mud puddles. So you take the good, and you fast-forward the bad, I guess. The good is very good! Alas the bad is very bad. A remake - sans Spark Plug - wouldn't be a bad idea, if you ask me. 

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