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The City that Dreaded Sunset is a 1976 horror movie a couple of hooded killer who terrorised the border city of Texarkana, Arkansas in 1946 — leaving no fewer than 5 homicide victims in his wake. He was by no means caught. Primarily based on one in every of America’s most baffling homicide circumstances.
The film was directed by (and co-stars) Charles B. Pierce (The Legend of Boggy Creek).
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The movie is introduced within the type of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, with a narrator describing the actions as they’re proven. Ben Johnson stars because the law-enforcement officer trying to catch the killer. Daybreak Wells (Mary Ann of Gilligan’s Island) seems as one of many victims and the ever-reliable Andrew Prine as Johnson’s deputy.
The City That Dreaded Sunset was one in every of a raft of movies within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties that presupposed to be primarily based on true occasions so as to add further zing to each the advertising of the movie and a documentary really feel, typically with a deadpan voice-over at the start and finish of the movie.
As with many of those movies, the ‘fact’ on-screen needs to be taken with an inexpensive quantity of salt, although there was a serial killer in Texarkana within the Nineteen Forties, hooded, as within the movie, who very unusually killed his victims with a shotgun. The true hook of each the real-life murders and the movie is that somewhat like Jack the Ripper, though many names have been bandied round as seemingly suspects through the years, the killer was by no means knowingly caught.
The movie is true to the Nineteen Forties interval and the performing is effectively above common for a comparatively low-budget outing; Prine had already made his identify within the likes of Centerfold Women and Barn of the Bare Useless while Johnson was immediately recognisable from numerous cowboys flicks (and, oddly, a minimum of two killer bee motion pictures).
Director Pierce additionally seems in a starring position, largely for comedian aid, not in contrast to the marginally inappropriate slapstick cop capers in The Final Home on the Left. That is at odds with the sombre tone of the depiction of the masked killer murdering one in every of his victims with a knife hooked up to a trombone. You’ve learn that sentence appropriately.
The movie’s affect might be seen in numerous slasher movies all through the Eighties, particularly Friday thirteenth Half 2 which options killer Jason Vorhees sporting an nearly similar hood.
The movie was launched theatrically within the United States by American Worldwide Footage (AIP) in December 1976. It acquired a VHS launch on Warner Residence Video within the Eighties and Good Instances Video in 2001.
In 2014, a remake was launched.
Daz Lawrence, MOVIES & MANIA
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