The People Who Own The Dark (1976) is a great title. It conjures up images of people. In the dark. Who own it. Does the movie do it justice?
The first thing to know about The People Who Own The Dark is that it’s a Spanish film. America dubbed it and ditched twelve minutes of runtime. Apparently, some character development was lost. What little nudity and gore it contains was retained.
This confuses activists. On the one hand, capitalism exploited foreign work. On the other hand, capitalism refrained from censorship. Ergo, they don’t know whether to hold a sit-down or start a march. My guess is they will hold with a sit-down. The Ozempic hasn’t fully kicked in yet.
As an aside, will Ozempic dent the lesbian demographic? How many lesbians aren’t real lesbians? Maybe they are just overweight women being ignored. Once men notice them, their ovaries will recalibrate to baby-making mode.
Anyway, let’s shine a light on The People Who Own The Dark…
The People Who Own The Dark
The People Who Own The Dark is a Leon Klimovsky joint.
Now there’s a Spanish name if I ever heard one. Klimovsky was born in Argentina, however, which still doesn’t make things any clearer in the moniker department. Regardless, he was a big deal in Spanish films during the 1960s-1970s. He worked mainly on Spaghetti Westerns, war movies, exploitation film and horror movies.
My kind of guy. However, I would not recognize any of his film credits…unless a title of one happened to be El queso está viejo y podrido. Dónde está el sanitario?
Vincente Aranda wrote The People Who Own The Dark. Aranda does have a credit I recognize: the cult film The Blood Splattered Bride, which was based on the 1872 vampire novel Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Tarantino even named a chapter of Kill Bill after it.
Together, Klimovsky and Aranda craft a movie that is somewhat intriguing in its premise but does not fully leverage its bonkers plot, which is thus:
A group of powerful men hold an Eyes Wide Shut party at an isolated mansion. A nuclear attack happens, and they are besieged by blind people…
This is more proof that Hollywood isn’t even trying anymore. All they can think to do is reboot another Stephen King property for the fifth time.
The Shiny Happy People Who Own The Dark
The People Who Own The Dark features a cavalcade of Spanish stars. Maybe. No one who doesn’t regularly eat Paella knows. Nevertheless, a few familiar faces appear.
Alberto de Mendoza plays the hero. Or, he is at least as heroic as a man who shows up at a party to honor the philosophy of Marquis De Sade can be. Viewers might recognize him from the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing/Telly Savalas vehicle Horror Express.
Richardo Palacios portrays another party participant in The People Who Own The Dark. He portrayed a bartender in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.
Maybe the biggest star of the film is the Spanish Boris Karloff/Lon Chaney/Bela Lugosi: Paul Naschy. He did all the classic monsters…in Spanish: Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, Quasimodo, Fu Manchu and the Mummy. Naschy also did a series of werewolf films that comprised the Hombre Lobo series.
One of the actresses also had a familiar face. Her name is Roswithka Bertasha Smid Honczar, but she goes by the stage name of Nadiuska. She played Conan’s mom in Conan The Barbarian.
The rest of the cast is made up by a fat man, a bald man, a woman with a big hairdo, a sexy blond, a sexy red head, a black girl, an Adam Scott-type, a perm guy and a guy with sunglasses. As for the people who own the dark, they are a mob of Bird Box-looking people.
The People Under The Stairs Who Own The Dark
And here we come to the rub of the matter: what works and what doesn’t work.
There’s no denying The People Who Own The Dark has a fun premise. Some suitably goofy foreign horror movie stuff happens. For example, a man shoots real pigeons instead of clay pigeons, a man eats out of can with his fingers while holding a fork that would probably work better, the fat guy goes feral and briefly crawls past the camera naked in a pig mask, and blind people accurately throw rocks at windows.
It is also always enjoyable to watch an older film for its visual aesthetic. Old film stock has a lot of soul to it in the way it displays colors. By way of comparison, I watched The Killer Inside Me (2010), and its cinematography was so flat that it made 1950s Texas look like a video I took of office furniture insurance purposes at one time.
On the flipside of the coin, The People Who Own The Dark has a slow setup. The nuclear attack takes place offscreen. When the blind person siege finally happens, it is almost an afterthought, before the film trapses off into a dour drawn-out, leftfield ending.
One thing I did enjoy about the ending was how one of the “dead” people raised their head to see if the camera had tracked over to them position yet, spots said camera and quickly puts their head back down to continue to be deceased.
If one was so inclined, they could read subtext into the film that touches upon the rich vs. the poor. I’m not sure if anyone wants to think that hard about it, though.
The People Who Own The Dark
Ultimately, file The People Who Own The Dark under interesting, but underwhelming. It’s the type of film you could turn on in the middle of the night and have a fair amount of fun with, but it’s not the type of film that can survive any kind of hyped recommendation.
These people may own the dark, but they should probably think about selling it to the Italians. The Italians could have really made a cracking movie with this kind of premise.
