Review #1: Dark Ride (2006)

Cast/Notable Credits:
Craig Singer (Director)

Jamie Lynn Sigler (Cathy): The Sopranos T.V. series

Patrick Renna (Bill): The Sandlot (1993), Dorm Daze (2003)

Jennifer Tisdale (Liz): The Hillside Strangler (2004), Bring It On 3 (2007)...pictured left...also the older sister of singer/actress Ashley Tisdale

Trailer:



Dark Ride is one of the After Dark Films: Horror Fest 8 Films to Die For.

Plot:

A set of twins are murdered in a fun house dark ride in 1989. The killer is caught and sent to a mental hospital.

Fast forward to 2003, the killer escapes from the mental hospital. In the mean time, five college kids embark on a spring break trip. While traveling to their destination, the kids decide to stay the night in the old dark ride fun house. The kids get accidentally locked in the fun house and...dead bodies start to pile up.

Villain:

The bad guy is a deformed retard who kills because he is “acting out” the scenes of the dark ride with his victims. Overall the bad guy is nothing special, but wasn’t a puss or too over the top.

Cast:

Annoying cast of unlikable characters. Only three hot chicks in a small cast, two of them I wished for them to get axed. One of them was a hitchhiker they picked up on the way. By the way, WTF? How come all these movies tend to have hot female hitchhikers? Screw the bars and on-line dating, if you need a girl go driving with your buddies and just pick up a hot hitchhiker on the way.

SFX/Gore:

There were a total of nine deaths in the film. None of which was anything spectacular, the security guard coming the closest. Only a couple deaths were a little too over the top in gore. The rest of the film’s special effects were decent.

TNA:

Three hot chicks, one sex act and one set of boobies. Hooray hitchhicker! (Andrea Bogart pictured right)

T.Gun's Take:
It was a generic storyline and concept. I liked it better the first time I saw it when it was called “Funhouse” back in the early 80’s. I pretty much called the twist ending towards the end.

I love giving extra points for having twin girls in a film too bad they were like twelve years old. The only character I recognized was the dude (Patrick Renna) from National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze. Apparently one of the hot chicks (Jamie-Lynn Sigler pictured right) was from the Sopranos (sorry fans, never seen).

I had several rants during the film. First of all, I hated when the kids pulled into a derelict gas station (in which some creepy old fart runs) to get gas. Watching the film, you can obviously tell they were still in the city when they did this. When a normal person stops to get gas, doesn’t they pull into something like a 7-11, Texaco or something. After all, we are in the 21st century. More and more in these movies I see kids pull into some run down gas station that looks like something out of th 70's.You could tell that they don’t take credit cards and in the Age of the Plastic, who carries cash any more? With that being said, who would pull into that gas station?

Secondly, there’s one kid that knows the “urban legend” of the dark ride. Any more, it seems like someone always know the legend to build fear into the rest of the cast. It always starts off like this…” I grew up in the town next door.When I was young, two kids were murdered there back in the day.” Guess what, it happened in this film. Shit, I don’t even remember who died in my town last week. Hell if I know someone who died in the town next door fourteen years ago. Why does some one always have to know the “urban legend”?

Finally, it was towards the end and there were a few kids still left alive at this point, when one of them pulls a cell phone out of his pocket and tries to text message a friend for help. I almost shit a brick! Let me get this straight.You’ve been trapped in this fun house place where several of your friends have been murdered, and you’ve been running around for the past thirty minutes trying to escape, and THEN you decide to whip out your cell phone to call for help…wait a second, not CALL for help, but TEXT MESSAGE another friend. Huh?

Andrea Bogart (hitch-hiker who shows her gifts) is listed along with Nicholas Brendon (Buffy TV) in part of the cast of the new Friday the 13th remake/re-imagining. :) Reorts ended up false! B00! Initially I didn’t mind the flick, but the more I thought about it, the more I hated it. It was a modernized version of “Funhouse”.

Misc. Movie Trivia:
-Film opened on November 17, 2006 as part of the After Dark Films 8 Films to Die for(released on DVD on March 27, 2007)