Dark Ride (2006) Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Patrick Renna, David Clayton Rogers. Directed by Craig Singer. Screenplay by Robert Dean Klein and Craig Singer.
We are entitled to hate certain movies, and hate is the appropriate word for Dark Ride.
The plot, such as it can be called, is as follows: group of college kids going on a weekend trip out of town decide to make an unplanned detour to break into a dark ride in Asbury Park. (We did this shit all the time when I was in college. For a while, I thought I would make a career of it.) They bump into a creepy but entirely superfluous gas station attendant, then pick up a hitchhiker, then go get killed off one by one. By a deranged lunatic. Who escaped from an asylum (using, to judge by it, superhuman powers.) And who lives in the dark ride.
Right.
We have several means of dispatch in this film, all shown in loving, blood dripping detail: an asylum orderly is killed by having a flashlight rammed though him, a hot young thang has her head tenderly sawed off while giving a blow job (you read that right), a hapless security guard has his head lopped in half with a convenient machete. On that last, we are dealing with a machete so thin and sharp, apparently, that the halves of the guard’s head stay together for several seconds, then flop to each side so that we may watch with lustful joy the quivering bloody brains.
Let us forget the terrible dialogue. Let us forget the hapless performances. Let us pay no attention to the clumsy pacing, the rotten score, the terrible lighting, all technical goofs. Hell, let’s forgive the swiss-cheese plot (which bears more than a passing resemblance to The Funhouse) and the absurd, intelligence-insulting ‘twist’ ending. Let’s even overlook the boneheaded basic premise of this turd.
Because these things, as bad as they may be, are not grounds to hate a movie. To consider it a waste of time and money, sure. To take them as reasons to avoid all future work involving these individuals, you bet. But not justification for hatred.
That falls to the bloodlust evinced by the makers of this film. And bloodlust is not too harsh a term. Most of this picture exists for nothing more than the most ghastly, grisly, blood-drenched means of dispatch available. It is a vile, reprehensible effort. And it’s not even the gore that’s the worst of it, though that is pretty awful. No, what makes Dark Ride truly worthy of every ounce of opprobrium that can be heaped upon it is the wretched mean-spiritedness of the whole affair. This paucity of spirit is not even the result of a coherent worldview, in which case it might still have some merit. It is simply the off-handed, slope-browed meanness of pinheads who have been brought up on the notion that slopping viscera is the height of cool. It is the vacuous aesthetic of the gorehound. It is the heartless love of torture, the soulless worshipping of pain, and it trumps any other human concerns. There are no other areas of human experience to be explored in films such as this, no values to examine, no conflicts of the human heart. There is only the tearing of meat and the spilling of fluids. One expects the maker of fare such as this to spend any spare time hanging out at the local slaughterhouse, gazing wistfully upon the offal.
Well, offal Dark Ride is. It is a film beneath contempt. And it brings me to the brink of despair to know that, apparently, Dark Ride 2 is in the works.
Jesus wept.
