THE story behind The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a true one. In 1946 a killer terrorised the small American border town of Texarkana. The hooded attacker, labelled by the popular press at the time as 'The Phantom', claimed eight victims in all and mostly picked his targets off from young teenage couples caught canoodling down remote lovers lanes.
Apparently motiveless and seemingly random in their nature, these crimes caught the imagination of the nation, turning the faceless killer into a kind of bogey man for post-war America.
What renders this tale of small-town terror compelling to this day, however, is the fact that no-one was ever apprehended for the crimes and the case remains unsolved.
The killer, it seems, simply disappeared, sliding silently back into the society he tormented or merely moving on to new territory to continue his bloody career path unhindered. Either way, the lack of closure in the case was always going to get the seedier side of Hollywood sniffing around and 30 full years later Charles B Pierce turned the mystery into a slice of overripe but still entertaining B-movie hokum.
Released in 1976 by those kings of all things exploitation American International Pictures and reissued on blu-ray this month by Eureka! Entertainment, it’s an odd little film that answers very few questions but nevertheless lingers long in the memory once the end credits have rolled.
Delivered, much like the director’s previous offering The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1973), as a near documentary with a serious-minded voice over reading out the dates and delivering the cold facts as they happen, it tells its bloody tale both simply and effectively.
The murders, when they come, are delivered with a neatly impressive economy. Lovers are pounced upon and killed with gruesome efficiency by the hulking villain in his Klan-like white sack mask and Pierce films these moments with considerable style. Playing around with historical fact, he even has a victim dispatched via a knife attached to a slide trombone in one particularly gruesome sequence.
The killer, seen only lurching towards his victims in turned-up jeans or heavy breathing behind his blank sheet of a mask, is a disturbingly faceless figure lurking motiveless in the small-town shadows.
Where the film really falls apart, though, is in the ill-advised interludes of redneck humour that Pierce scatters between the grimly executed murder scenes. The director himself plays a gormless patrolman called 'Sparkplug' and his slack jawed buffoonery falls flat, leaving large sections of the film feeling like a half-baked episode of The Dukes Of Hazard.
Only the heavyweight performance of Ben Johnson as Captain Morales as a Texas Ranger flown in to tackle the problem, and Andrew Prine as the perplexed town sheriff rise above a very basic standard of acting which is mostly provided by locals who huff and puff with all the eye-rolling amateurism they can muster.
Remade as a gorier contemporary thriller just last year, this 1976 take on the tale is still worthy of your attention, though – as a reminder of a senseless series of murders if nothing else.
