"Dark Ride" is typical of your average American horror film. It has to have lots of girls with big jugs who like to jiggle them, at least one sex scene which is pretty blatant, a semi-toothless redneck, and a disfigured psycho killer.
Ho-Hum. Haven't I seen this movie a dozen times in the last couple of years? Taking all the bad aspects of TCM, and The Funhouse as well as Friday The 13th, the director here does nothing new. He gives no frights, just shocks. And they are all expected shocks.
Starting out with two teenage girls being pretty much ripped apart (we see one of their bodies) by the disfigured psycho that lives in an amusement park attraction called "Dark Ride", he is put in a mental hospital for over a decade until he (what else?) escapes and heads back to the amusement park.
By this time, a group of drugged out and horny college students on Spring Break have decided to stay inside the abandoned amusement park ride for kicks as well as to save money for a hotel. Another lesson: Never spend the night in an abandoned Carnival ride where a maniac has murdered several people. Even.
Now, apparently the police here are not the smartest in the world. Psycho escapes, so lets not go take a look at the place he lived and killed people at. So, lucky killer gets to start bumping off the students while he (guess what?) Wears a Halloween Mask to hide his deformity. Why they didn't just name him "Jason" I don't know.
Honest, I had a lot of hopes for this film. After the previous three being such winners I was truly pumped for this one. My hopes and dreams were shot down in under 15 minutes.
"Oh, but it had this great scene where a girl is going down on some guy and gets her head chopped off!!!"
Whooped-de-freaking do. They spent over ten minutes on that scene and they could have done it in under two if the director knew what he was doing. Want me to prove it?
"Silver Streak" directed by Arthur Hiller with Gene Wilder and Jill Clayburgh. After having drinks in the club car, Wilder and Clayburgh retire to his private car. After a few moments of passionate kissing, she moves her head toward his crotch and while he is smiling a dead body drops in front of his face. Watch the movie, it is a classic.
The point is, there was no need for that scene to take that long. A good director and good actors (not saying these were -bad- actors, they did what the director told them) could have made it plain what was going on in a lot less time and then given us a plot. But not in "Dark Ride". Instead of something original, lets do the same old crap that has been going on in low-budget films for years, the same cheap sex scenes, the same stupid characters, the same lousy ending.
Audiences today are too dumb to know the difference. Lets just crap in a box, call it a horror film, and let them watch that.
No thanks.