[Dark Ride]
Plot:A group of six friends on a road trip stop off at an amusement park attraction named 'Dark Ride', unaware that a psychopath who brutally murdered two girls, has just escaped a mental institution and is seeking refuge there.

Cast: Jamie-Lynn DiScala, Patrick Renna, David Clayton Rogers, Alex Solowitz, Andrea Bogart, Jennifer Tisdale, Chelsey Coyle, Brittney Coyle, Dave Warden.

My Thoughts:Silly rabbit, "Dark Ride" is for kids.

Review:It's official, the slasher genre is on serious life support. This is the way I see things after watching Craig Singer's "Dark Ride". The film follows an amusement park attraction called "The Dark Ride". It's quite menacing looking on the outside, and even more menacing looking on the inside. Two little girls enter the attraction at the beginning of the picture, and are never heard from again. But it's obvious to the viewer that someone or something camping out inside the ride snatched thme up and did horrible hings to them. Now some many years later, some college kids on a road trip decide it would be a good idea to stop over and check out the attraction which is scheduled to reopen soon (why? Considering no one has yet to find the killer of the two kids?).

At any rate, the teens decide to break in to the Dark Ride to do what else? Screw and smoke dope, and spit out terrible dialogue which gets considerably worse once they have left campus and are actually in the ride itself. "Dark Ride" is a very good experiment in how not to make a slasher movie. These paper thin characters are so intolerable that it's hard to care about their demise or survival. Characters pretty much set the tone for any horror film, you've gotta have atleast 2 or three (if you're lucky) characters that the viewer can root for. Me? As vicious and evil as he was, I still found myself rooting for the killer....that's how annoying these kids were. Jamie Lynn DiScala offered up some hope for the cast as the attractive and likeable (sometimes) Cathy, but by act three you stop feeling any pity for the girl considering the dumb moves she makes evading the grotesque looking killer.

The killer was supposed to be the most intriguing part of the film, or that's atleast how the film was promoted in early press, with the killer being it's centerpiece. But Jonah fails at being intriguing at all. Intriguing or even rmeotely interesting for that matter. He's just another nuthouse escapee with a penchant for murdering annoying teens who dare trespass on his beloved home away from home. Michael Myers and Jason did the same thing, only with alot more style. Other than sporting a ripped up straightjacket, and a very tight clown mask, this guy isn't unique enough to be one of the more memorable slasher movie villains. His backstory isn't even noteworthy, as it's about as plain and uninspired as they come.

The good thing, one of the few good things about "Dark Ride" is that most of the teens meet very gruesome gore-worthy demises, and trust me in the case of this bunch it couldn't come sooner. Imagine the kids from "Carrie" mixed with the oversexed and over hormonal kids from "Night of the Demons 3" or "Friday the 13th". Not a good combination, although a Sherri Moon lookalike pops up early on in the movie and turns out to be a semi likeable character. That is until they hit the Dark Ride and she becomes a total slut.

You can tell two people worked on this script though, as it seems like the movie took two different directions and the weaker of the two managed to overpower the other which might've been actually quite entertaining to watch had it come to fuition. Writers Craing Singer and Robert Dean Klein try to snatch the brass ring one more time at the end by tossing in an absurd plot twist which while it does make sense from the point of view of the geek character of the movie, overall it just seems like a way to give the film an outrageous climax. Something to give the viewers something to talk about, considering the other 90 minutes is mostly forgettable.

"Dark Ride" had a shot at being a cult classic, but instead it fell too deep into the cliche trap and stops making sense too many times during the course of the picture to even reach decent thriller/horror status. A very disappointing horror flick indeed.

Positives:Gory kills, decent performance by Descala.

Negatives:A dumb plot twist at the end, bad acting by most of the cast, annoying characters, a lame killer with a lame backstory, and a very messy script.

Overall:Skip it.





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