The Dark originally began shooting under Tobe Hooper, then best known for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Hooper, who has himself directed some real stinkers in recent years, walked off the project several days into shooting after disagreements with the producers. He was then replaced by John ‘Bud’ Cardos, who had directed the quite good Kingdom of the Spiders (1977).

Kingdom of the Spiders showed Cardos as a genre director of promise but here Cardos seems barely interested in the exercise. The whole affair has the look, feel and pace of a made-for-tv movie – which is where most of its’ cast find employment. Sequences seem padded out as if to fill running time to the commercial break. Most of the performers don’t seemed to have even cared to make the effort – William Devane walks through as some kind of middle-class biker with smug and unmoving smile, and Jacqueline Hyde and Keenan Wynn provide enough ham between them that they could feed the entire production crew for a month. The script is atrociously written, the dialogue so infuriatingly banal and the narrative so indifferently developed that one begins to suspect the screenwriter fell asleep during the writing process. At no point does it take time to explain why the monster needs to rip off one person’s head a night, shoot rays from its eyes or even explain how such a mindless creature can navigate its way across the stars.

Of course it is not entirely fair to lump all the problems at the scriptwriter’s door. A large number of the problems in the film are due to the fact that it underwent a lot of post-production tinkering. The reason for this is that in the time between the film was shot and it was released, Alien (1979) came out and was a smash hit. In the original version of the script the creature was supposed to be the zombie resurrected from the Civil War. But after Alien hit the film underwent re-editing to make it a quick Alien cash-in. All scenes of and referring to the zombie figure wielding an axe to behead its victims were eliminated. And added were one brief effects shot of something coming down from the sky, as well as a few optically superimposed laser beams shooting out of the creatures eyes, all intended to suggest the creature was now an alien.

John ‘Bud’ Cardos began as a production assistant for notorious Z-movie director Al Adamson. His career, that once seemed quite promising on the basis of Kingdom of the Spiders, really bottomed out after this. His other genre films are The Day Time Ended (1980), Night Shadows/Mutant (1984) and Outlaw of Gor (1987).