Dark Ride

While The Funhouse immediately came to mind when I rented Dark Ride a few years ago, I can’t totally take a shit on a movie that has a beheading while the babe is giving head to a lucky (for the moment) guy. This is the kind of body count film where a group of twenty-somethings decide to save some cash (not spending it on a hotel, as to save for spring break) by spending the night in an old funhouse, soon encountering danger. Yep, most of the cast is filled to the brim with heartthrobs and cuties as the selections for human target practice. It is all supposed to be fun and games, but lurking within the dark ride is evil. This is basically boilerplate for slasher films, isn’t it? You can substitute the faces and names of any cast and location, choose one or a few psychos to be among them in the darkness and shadows, and pick a number of murder set pieces to lengthen the run time. Like slashers in general, Dark Ride has a back story behind why the killings are occurring, and the typical twist regarding the killer none of the cast members expect. I have wrote so many reviews that have a synopsis similar to Dark Ride, and this will continue until my dying breath or the final review on the Blog from the Darkside. Variations on a theme (sometimes with only slight alterations) are commonplace in horror. Sometimes, if the right style and characterization can circumvent the obvious, I’m somewhat satisfied.

Here, a tragedy cements the legacy of a closed-down dark ride, murders of twin sisters (disemboweled) and the killer a demented carnival worker (who has a younger brother that seemed to be an audience the sicko hoped to please with his savagery). A funhouse could very well house that same killer, but where’s the brother he’s so willing to please? Are the college kids spending the night in the Dark Ride in trouble of suffering similar savage fates as the mutilated sisters?

First, I do want to give the film credit on its (for me) lone major strength and that’s the setting which produces that same type of “macabre wax dummies in mood lighting” feel so prevalent in films about wax museums and funhouse horror rides. Within Dark Ride are lots of grotesque figures and horror set pieces lit in appropriately eye popping ways, the killer has one of those doll-faced masks that is too small for his face (and in that, it even gives him an extra bit of menace) and a tall, hulking body in one of those workman suits, and fun character played by Patrick Renna (as the odd man out of the attractive cast), and has a creepy face and disposition (as well as a trustworthy face and disposition when outside of the Dark Ride surroundings). Renna is in that Disney soccer movie, and the filmmakers do some fun lighting of his face. Darkened eyes and having lost weight, Renna’s Bill just stands out; maybe, this is because he looks like a square peg and while his social circle are that oval hole he doesn’t fit in. Renna’s Bill is a film buff, often flummoxed by how deer-in-headlights his friends are to his movie-referrences. I think, obviously, Andrea Bogart’s ditsy, chatty, scantily clad bombshell will attain a strong remembrance thanks to her nice boobies and lack of attire. I love me some Jamie-Lynn Sigler, but her role is all typical final-girl…lots of hysterics and fright. I did enjoy how she looks like a complete wreck (with wet hair and bruised eye) by film’s end, as her character has withstood the onslaught so many final girls face in the slasher genre. Jennifer Tisdale (yep, a Tisdale) is Sigler’s blond tag-along buddy (with a rather wise-ass, don’t-take-crap-from-nobody attitude and humor). David Clayton Rogers is the love interest of Sigler, but their relationship is strained due to his wandering eye. He’s a bit of a douchebag (he doesn’t know if he loves Sigler or not, judging their relationship status by if they fuck or not while on spring break), and he’s always bullying Renna (insults, the occasional smack across the back of the head, etc.), so his “dismissal” from the film didn’t bother me in the slightest. Alex Solowitz loves the girls, with his first scene showing him serenading a college gal smitten by him. He immediately leaves her only to check out Tisdale, noticing that she’s looking mighty tasty to his unsatisfied appetites. Before long, it is Bogart that gives him the hot-and-bothereds and while it appears the two might engage in a sexual encounter, the killer has other ideas.

Simply put, most of the characters are of that slasher garden variety. The funhouse is the real star, here, and as the slasher genre does time and again, characters are picked off one by one. The kids ride in Solowitz’s van (yep, there’s shag interior in the stomach of the van, too), and the killer escapes from his insane asylum cell thanks to bumbling idiot hospital staff. Rolling your eyes yet? Well, just like in The Funhouse, the college kids in Dark Ride get locked in their Asbury funhouse and must find a way out or else. Some gore (a head is split apart by a scythe, a girl is shown with her lower torso torn open, a hand with a flashlight is put all the way through a victim, a victim is turned into a hanging bloody figure inside the ride as if a ghoulish attraction, a machete-sliced neck leads to a head pulled away from the body after oral sex, etc.) may impress (it seems this is something I repeat over and over with slasher movies), and Dark Ride does contain the Big 3 B’s (Blood, Boobs, and Body Count) often important to the type of audience it seems made especially for. There’s a panic pace that many of these films depend upon to stress the desire of horrified characters’ hopes in staying ahead of their pursuer, only for them to run out of real estate (and unable to quite get away because they’re not as familiar with their surroundings as the killer). Dark Ride follows (no surprise, right?) that same pattern at the end. Tisdale is hurled against a wall while Solowitz gets a knife in the gut by someone he trusts after taking a beating from the killer once he’s tossed through a window. These two are examples of victims who try and try to find a means of escape but there’s no exit for them.

I can’t really put it more plainly: Dark Ride is exactly the kind of film you have seen in the past. Is it something of a throwback? It does have all the elements from past slasher movies without necessarily improving upon them. This won’t toss you any surprises. It is what inspired it and dedicates itself to the audience looking for undemanding content that doesn’t subject them to using high brain function. There are times, though, when a ride into the dark elicits thrills and shrieks, and Dark Ride just might be what the audience needs on a dull night.


I was kind of inspired to watch Dark Ride as it was set during spring break and since my viewing of it was in the aftermath (and middle of spring) of that, this just seemed fitting.