We all remember the days when the Friday night trip to the videostore meant two things: 1.) a beeline for the horror section that may or may not have included scattering the elderly to the floor and 2.) walking out with a thick, heavy armload of VHS. I remember a party I had when I was a kid wherein me and a host of my school chums walked to the local video conglomerate and it took three of us to carry our bounty back to the waiting glow of the TV and the VCR. Since then, the advent of DVD and now Blu-ray has all but abolished the VHS market. While this has scores of advantages for film geeks, the one genre particularly shafted by the conversion seems to be horror. There are so many titles that, for whatever reason, never made the leap to a higher definition. Being that I live in Austin and their local videostores are treasure troves of the forgotten, I am in a prime position to find these gems and review them. To wit, I give you Terror Tapes, my weekly report of films that are either impossible to find on DVD or just plain don't exist in any other format beyond VHS. For my inaugural entry, I give you a film I have been wanting to see for years: The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a title that is only available on VHS, just to clarify. I first heard of this film when it was referenced in Scream. I remember canvassing my videostore for months hoping beyond hope that they would suddenly become cool and stock it. But, as was the case with so many things at that age, my ardent desire to see this film ended in disappointment. As I got older, it became a forgotten urge and in the sporadic moments when it did appear in conversation I was never moved to do an extensive search. But then came the move to Austin and the tapping of the rich supply of obscurity that it offered. It was then that I realized that The Town That Dreaded Sundown was a movie that had never graduated to disc formats so I dusted off the VCR and prepared for the moment I had been looking forward to since hearing that throw-away line in Scream. What an odd story.

The best part of that story is that I finally get around to seeing this film and it takes place in Texas! In the spring/summer of 1946, a serial killer plagued the town of Texarkana, a small community on the border of Texas and Arkansas. The Town That Dreaded Sundown claims from moment one that the events of the film are entirely accurate and only the names have been changed. Unlike certain current alien abduction movies, I can vouch for the authenticity of the story behind this film. A masked madman is stalking couples and shuffling them off the mortal coil by means of a revolver and a lead pipe (and oddly none of this occurs in a study or lounge). The murders are grisly enough for Texarkana to enlist the aid of several law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the Texas Rangers. Will that be enough to bring down the lunatic dubbed "The Phantom"?

This film exhibited a great deal of promise early on. True, I am not a big fan of incessant narration but I understand its merit in a true crime story. The scenes of the killer stalking the couples in the dark were brilliantly shot and the tenacity with which he went after his victims was something truly unsettling. He would beat the guy to death with slow, dull thuds while the woman sat petrified in the vehicle; waiting for her number to be called. There is also an especially brutal moment, when The Phantom has escalated to the revolver, where he finishes off a wounded victim. The boy is crawling hopelessly toward a wooden gate and the killer has the gun's sight set right between his shoulder blades for a good minute before he actually shoots. He knows he has the kid over a barrel and savors every last ruthless moment.

I really like the simple design of the killer's costume. I can't be sure if it was based on actual accounts or if it was just a conscious choice on the part of the filmmakers, but the plain burlap sack mask with the single eye-hole is fantastic. It reminded me of when I was writing my thesis on serial killer mentality in college and came across drawings of the Zodiac killer taken from supposed witness accounts. It has a backwoods, organic quality that lends credence to the authenticity of the story. The fact that the rest of the attire was a very simple combination of worker's clothes really drove home the idea that this guy, whoever he was, hid among the citizenry during the day.

But the overall problem with The Town That Dreaded Sundown is the law enforcement element. Don't get me wrong, I love Ben Johnson. He was a great actor and his skill in this film is not at all in question. You really do buy his fervor in wanting to catch the killer, but he's being assisted by the biggest boobs in America. The police force built around him apparently went to the academy with the cops from the original Last House on the Left. There are moments where they are literally borrowing slow motion car chase shots from "The Dukes of Hazzard" and that is completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the film. The silliness of these moments really limit the film and force it to fall tragically short.

Well that's this week's Terror Tape. Tune in next time when I go diving in the dumpsters of forgotten formats.