The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Too much of everything

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN is an amazing movie. It's a horror film, a police procedural, and a documentary, all in one. In 1946, a hooded figure known only as "The Phantom", stalked the town of Texarcana, killing the unwary. The movie strays somewhat from the facts of the actual case, but not enough to make it unbelievable. The only scene that is truly "out there", and plays loose w/ the facts, is the notorious "trombone scene", where a woman is killed, using her own "re-purposed" trombone against her. In reality, it was a sax. Other than a few other, minor details, the story is solid enough. This is also a very good film for fans of Andrew Prine and / or Ben Johnson, each of whom put in excellent performances here. Of special note is Dawn Wells, who certainly proves there's more to her than "Mary Ann"! Her harrowing scene near the end is the best of the movie! It's also the most accurate. Frightening, informative, and entertaining, TTTDS remains a unique and influential film...

Texarkana, 1946: a hooded killer is on the prowl, first targeting young couples on lovers' lanes, but eventually attacking people in their own home. While the townsfolk hide away in fear, police deputy Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine) and Texas ranger Captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson) try to track down the killer.Loosely based on a true story, The Town That Dreaded Sundown takes a pseudo-documentary approach, complete with sombre, matter-of-fact voice-over filling in the details, a technique that only serves to detract from the narrative. Also working against the film is some dreadful comic relief in the form of hapless patrolman A.C. Benson (played by the film's director Charles B. Pierce).If only Pierce had done away with the docudrama narration and focused more on the horror and less on police procedure, this could have been a classic of the slasher genre—the deaths are certainly brutal enough. In the end, however, it's nothing more than a unexceptional drive-in B-movie, the only truly memorable moment being the novel use of a trombone as a murder weapon.

I was surprised never to hear of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders until last night; I had studied the case of the Zodiac Killer and never knew an unknown prowler was terrorizing lovers lanes in the US 20 years earlier (I guess the fact that the so-called Phantom Killer never sent a single cipher is what makes him less interesting today). Nevertheless, after the Zodiac terrorized America, the Texarkana murders got the big screen treatment with The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), a film that, I understand, got played in Texarkana every Halloween for years. The question is why, given the horror is undermined by bad attempts at comedy and that comedy is based on a rather unflattering portrayal of the local yokels. It turns out it's no wonder why the Phantom got away- according to this movie, it was because the Keystone Cops were on the case. The "Sparkplug" character was intolerable, far too stupid to be funny- he has no idea where keys go, and the fact that he drives a car carrying our hero detective into a swamp right when they've apprehended a main suspect is bewildering. In drag, he and the fat detective with the moustache as decoys also look like the least convincing teenagers I've ever seen in film. Given the creative liberties taken with the story, it's disappointing the Phantom never "got" Sparkplug- I surely would have been rooting for the killer in that scenario.It's a shame, because the rest of the film is fairly competently done- not so much as a slasher film but as a murder mystery, which is more of what I was after. They should have stuck with that approach.

This movie was incredibly bad. It was literally an insufferably amateurish attempt at lurid, psycho-sexploitation cinema. For 1976, it was so anachronistic that it had the feel of a 50s B-movie. It featured Ben Johnson in a wooden role and the character of a local bumbling deputy, who was supposed to be comic relief, but his buffoonery was inserted so awkwardly that it simply added more pitiful misery to the town's overall effort. A truly horrible film...yet somehow, like a train wreck, I couldn't seem to stop watching as I prepared for the next ridiculous encounter with an inept, helpless screaming prom queen. Afterthought: where were all the guns? Texarkana...and no one had a gun until 4/5ths of the film was done?