Reviews are coming out of the new remake of the 1976 cult classic “Town That Dreaded Sundown.” Drew Taylor reviewed the movie on The Playlist and says the “Remake of 1970s horror cult classic is an ambitious failure.”
And while “Town That Dreaded Sundown” is ambitious and supremely weird, it fails to cohere into something more resonant. For much of the movie it feels like what would have happened if Charlie Kaufman had written “Scream.” Then it becomes another dumb slasher movie.
Rob Hunter of Film School Rejects says,”‘The Town That Dreaded Sundown’ Isn’t Afraid of a Terribly Weak Script.”
“Script is uninteresting and lacks smarts; finale regresses to laughable “slasher” cliches; the trombone kill is still dumb”
There’s a whole tract of the film dedicated to the fact that the town has been frozen in time. People dress like they’re still in the seventies, old cars putter down the street and nobody owns a cell phone. It’s saying something about the nature of grief; if you don’t let go of a horrible event, from a town being ravaged by a series of brutal murders or your parents being senselessly killed in an automobile accident, then that horrible event defines your whole existence.
Texarkana shown from the trailer.
