The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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THE
TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
**½/****
BD – Image B+
Sound B-
Extras B+
starring
Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Jimmy Clem, Dawn Wells
screenplay
by Earl E. Smith
directed
by Charles B. Pierce

THE
EVICTORS
**½/****
Image B
Sound B-
starring
Vic Morrow, Michael Parks, Jessica Harper, Sue Ane Langdon
screenplay
by Charles B. Pierce, Gary Rusoff, Paul Fisk
directed
by Charles B. Pierce

by
Jefferson Robbins Charles B. Pierce's
1976 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown makes
a fetish of breath.
The bag-headed killer, ripped from the headlines of 1946 Texarkana, is
a
mouth-breather, his mask working like a bellows whether he's exerting
himself
or not. He's announced by his respiring, as when rural housewife Helen
Reed (Dawn
Wells) ceases brushing her rich black hair to listen for him outside
her home.
And his most artful, or perhaps comical, kill is executed with a
bayonet
trombone, stabbing with each exhalation. He's the old stereotype of the
heavy-breathing phone pervert writ deadly, shambling up to parked
teenagers and
taking his jollies as he may. Sexual assault is implicit in his
approach but
quickly disavowed, although he heavily bites his earliest female
victim. An
oral compulsion that is sexual but not; a murder that is penetrative
rape but
not… As scripted, the never-captured Phantom Killer of Texarkana
would be a
pretty interesting psychological study.

The Town That Dreaded
Sundown is clever in this way and many others. It
exploits the true-story trope with deftness, taking the unsolved
brutalizations
and killings that terrorized the postwar Arkansas-Texas town and making
a good
old-fashioned American slasher flick out of them. It lets Ben Johnson
walk tall
as Texas Ranger Rick Morales, detraining in Texarkana with folksy
authoritarianism on his side and vowing to catch the hooded murderer
dead or
alive. It predates those films that would crystallize the slasher
genre, Halloween
(1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), although it's
hard to say whether it really
influenced them. It homages some predecessors in unexpected
ways–naming a
victim "Samuel Fuller," slo-mo'ing a Ben Johnson gun attack à la The
Wild Bunch (a touchstone film for Pierce, if the opening credits of his subsequent The Evictors are any indication)–and it makes damn fine use of classic cars. But
any suspense it
builds it is immediately dissipated, through low comedy or laconic
pacing or
misdirection. A late offering from Sam Arkoff after his pioneering partner James H. Nicholson parted ways with American International Pictures, it
seems
balanced on the bubble between '70s grindhouse and '60s drive-in,
afraid to
venture too far down the dark avenues mapped by its subject matter.

In fact, rewrite or do
away with the portentous Vern Stierman narration, hold a few shots a
few
seconds longer, and what you have is a stab at a Malick pastiche. The
Town
That Dreaded Sundown is truly a beautifully shot picture
under DP James
Roberson, whose camera adores the dirt roads and thick bogs in his
viewfinder.
He glides and cuts among the dancers at a prom, shaping
them into
little tableaux of hope and promise and
melancholy as a prelude to two
new deaths. And those cars… The fact that the real "Phantom Killer"
of Texarkana plagued local lovers' lanes means Pierce gets to stage his slayings in and around some truly vintage autos, all of them easy on
the eyes.
(This slasher is so stealthy, he'll sneak up on your car while
it's moving.) Yet the beautiful notes are counterpointed by long stretches of vérité-style
vacuum, or Hal Needham-lite car stunts, or bits of blundering comedy
business
by Pierce himself as rageaholic, accident-prone town cop "Sparkplug"
Benson. This is where the movie's underlying squareness, its
indebtedness to
older exploitation forms, bumps problematically into post-giallo
psychosexual horror–and each tries to throttle the other. The diluted
approach
ill-serves the film's best components, like Andrew Prine's performance
as
Deputy Norman Ramsey, tormented by an early near-miss at capturing the
killer;
or the tense attack on Helen Reed, which violently scarifies a
beautiful woman,
sending her staggering incoherently through the night to be rescued.
Momentarily, at least, the killer is monstrous because he turns his
victim into
a monster, too.

More fully formed as
a bona fide horror movie, and more adventurous while still feeling a bit
airless, is Pierce's The Evictors. Arriving in
1979, it hones the
historical-document approach he took in prior films, like The
Town That
Dreaded Sundown and his beast-hunting chronicle The
Legend of Boggy
Creek, and it ticks along on a well-constructed fable of
stolen legacies
and Southern Gothic neurosis written by Pierce, Gary Rusoff, and Paul
Fisk.
It's 1947, and young New Orleans transplants Ben and Ruth Watkins
(Michael
Parks and Jessica Harper) move into a too-cheap-to-be-good north
Louisiana
homestead while he takes on a local mill job. The house, alas, has a history that
wasn't disclosed by shady realtor Jake Rudd (Vic Morrow, used
sparingly
but effectively), and stay-at-home Ruth uncovers it through sepia and
black-and-white flashbacks unspooled by neighbours and visitors. Just
as past
tenants were murdered by a denim-clad stalker, Ruth finds her peace
disrupted–but there's room to suspect that she's imagining phantom killers of her own
in a
spurt of domestic paranoia. The affair creaks a bit en route, much like
the
house where it's set, and you'll either see the twists coming or be
relatively
unimpressed once they arrive, but that's no strike against the ambition.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Scream Factory
disburses these bits of Pierce's low-budget oeuvre
in a fond
double-platter package that gives The Town That Dreaded Sundown the
Blu-ray spotlight while relegating bonus feature The Evictors to the
normally-disposable bundled DVD. The main flick shows its vintage,
and
that's not unwelcome–perfection is overrated when you're talking about
'70s
splatter fare. Instead, parent company Shout! treads lightly, with the
transfer
showcasing grain, intermittent specks, and even a series of long
vertical
scratches that mar the right side of the 2.40:1, 1080p frame as Morales
and his
posse mill about the town police station. The Town That
Dreaded Sundown converts
to HiDef just fine, if you overlook select attempts to compensate for
middling
focus with edge-enhancement, and the colours on display in Roberson's
lensing
shine through with a period richness. (The flaws come out in
day-for-night
scenes, of which there are several.) The picture offers one of those
viewing
experiences, like American Graffiti, that
successfully passes off the
'70s for an earlier era.

Over on the
DVD, The Evictors is a mite less refined in its 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced transfer, looking more battered as well as comparatively faded. On the sound front, The Town That Dreaded Sundown works
what magic it can with a minimalist DTS-HD MA 2.0 track–actually mono
spread over two channels. There's a good share of paperiness to the
audio,
but though the background bustle and blasts of violence can degrade to a
wall of
sound, those spikes are relatively few and sort of cathartic when
they do
arrive. The same criticism applies to The Evictors'
DD 2.0 mix over on
the DVD, where the wall of sound gets a lot taller. For what it's
worth, the
DVD version of The Town That Dreaded Sundown is
bare of the commentary
track and subtitle options afforded on the Blu-ray.

Said yakker, featuring horror-film journalist Justin Beahm interviewing
Texarkana
scholar Jim Presley, is less about the movie and its making than it is about
the
"Texarkana Moonlight Murders" that inspired it. Presley paints a
picture of the postwar town, which sprawls across the state line, as a
violent
place underserved by law enforcement and unprepared for attack from a
motiveless serial killer. (Unlike the fictional murderer of the film,
the real
"Phantom Killer" did tend
to rape his
female victims when circumstance allowed.) The urgency drew Texas
Rangers under
the command of Manuel "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas, whose presence, in
Presley's telling, may have only added to the confusion and changed the
killer's pattern.

Production
company Red Shirt Pictures does an impressive job with the BD's handful
of video-based extras, starting with "Small Town Lawman: An Interview with Actor
Andrew
Prine" (9 mins., HD). The Jimmy Stewart-ish performer renders the disc's
first straightforward assessment of the groundbreaking Pierce: The
director
"often he didn't know what he was doing, but had the guts and the
gumption
to proceed forward and learn what was needed." One symptom of Pierce's
shortcomings may be the fact that Prine, so he says, scripted the
climactic
minutes of the film–the killer was never found, so some kind of
dramatic
resolution was called for. Full of praise for Ben Johnson throughout,
Prine
particularly recalls shooting that final scene: "Both Ben and I were so
hungover, we could hardly turn our heads without fainting….We'd had a
wonderful night, I was told." "Survivor Stories: An Interview with
Actress Dawn Wells" (5 mins., HD) sees the former Mary Ann relating
how
she won the role when Pierce, a friend who'd cast her in his 1976
western Winterhawk,
asked her to replace an actress who "couldn't carry groceries and talk
at
the same time." Wells says she sought to interview Katie Starks, the
Texarkana
survivor on whom her character was based, but was rebuffed. She worries
that
she overdid her farmhouse attack scene, though almost any viewer would
disagree–she's the best of the victims, if that doesn't sound weird.
While
filming an outdoor segment of that scene, the entire crew drew guns and
opened
fire to save her from a pit bull that broke its tether…and missed.

"Eye of the Beholder" (12 mins., HD)
catches up with cinematographer James Roberson, just twenty-five when
he lensed
The Town That Dreaded Sundown like an accomplished
pro. Similar to
Prine, his praise of Pierce is somewhat backhanded, and he's remarkably
light
on the technical aspects of the four-week, $400,000 shoot. He does, however, give
thanks for being allowed license in editing. "The Phantom of
Texarkana" is a click-through text-and-picture essay by "regional
horror" journalist Brian Albright, offering a respectable bio of Pierce
and some insidery production details lacking elsewhere. Turns out
there's talk
of "American Horror Story"'s Ryan Murphy helming a remake, which is
cause for both intrigue and a measure of dread. (Editor's Note: Since the release of this BD, the remake has gone into production with Addison Timlin, Gary Cole, and the late Ed Lauter starring and "Glee"'s Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directing and Murphy producing.) The theatrical
trailer is
here too, a two-minute HD presentation with respectable old-school
crackle
in its audio. Follow Jefferson Robbins on Twitter

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