Zombie Cult Classic With Original Batman Now Streaming Without Netflix

One Dark Night begins with police and emergency responders in the apartment of an occultist named Karl Raymarseivich Raymar, who was recently reported as deceased. Police discover that Raymar had an apartment full of young, dead women in various states of decay. Adding to the eerie scene are the bolts of electricity that seem to shoot from Raymar’s fingers as he’s lifted onto a stretcher, punching a hole in the ceiling.

As it turns out, the elderly Raymar was telekinetic. He took his ability to move objects psychically to a new level when he began kidnapping young women as a source of fuel. One Dark Night introduces audiences to Raymar’s form of psychic vampirism, where he feeds off an innocent person’s energy.

Apparently, Raymar tortured these women as they would feed him more energy based on how much agony they were experiencing. Farmer’s daughter Oliva (Melissa Newman) and her boyfriend Allan (Adam West) are approached by another occultist who reveals Raymar’s strategy of gaining powers so that he could immortalize himself. Though Allan is dismissive, the estranged killer’s daughter seems to think it’s all plausible.

One Dark Night also follows Julie (Meg Tilly), a high school girl who’s undergoing an initiation ceremony into a club called “The Sisters.” To gain entry and the other girls’ respect, Julie must spend the night (where else) in the mausoleum where Raymar has recently been interred. Armed with her sleeping bag and her wits, Julie settles in for the evening after being dropped off and tries to sleep.

Julie is unaware of two things. First, her classmates plan to dress up in costumes and sneak in to scare her. The second and more key development that required her attention is that Raymar’s body is beginning to use its dormant powers to bring the serial murderer back from the grave. Electricity begins to shoot from his fingers as the walls begin to shake and the coffins of his dead mausoleum mates begin to rise.

One Dark Night opens strongly and can convey the horror experienced by Raymar’s victims through facial expressions on the corpses. But the film is a slow burn, taking plenty of time to set up the prank pulled on Julie by the club and taking far too long to establish a reason for Raymar’s daughter to come to terms with her father’s unholy work.

For a budget of only $800,000, One Dark Night produced some pretty realistic special effects, and the makeup on the corpses and zombies was perfect. Many of the scenes were shot in an actual mausoleum, adding to the sense of realism.

One Dark Night also gets some points for taking a different approach to zombies. Rather than resurrected bodies that still have working brains that move in accordance with their animal instincts, the zombies in this film are all being controlled by Raymar as inanimate objects that are being moved by a master puppeteer.

REVIEW SCORE

The acting is about as bad as you can imagine, with really only Meg Tilly deserving any mention of praise. While there are certainly better zombie films out there, One Dark Night deserves a watch. Overall, it’s a 2.0/5.0-star movie.

You can stream One Dark Night for free with Tubi, Pluto, Roku, and Freevee, or rent it On Demand with Prime, AppleTV, and Google Play.