Dark Tower (1987)

Day 2 of Sobriety.

I recently revisited John Landis’ American Werewolf in London for the first time in decades. I watched it with my wife, who didn’t seem especially taken by it, despite my enthusings. While watching it, though, I was struck by how good Jenny Agutter was in her role, which lead me to think about how I have always liked her as an actress, even though I couldn’t really think of that much I had seen her in. Logan’s Run was perhaps the other real standout, and, of course, she was very good as a child actor in The Railway Children (1970) and I start Counting (1969). It dawned on me though, that I haven’t actually seen many of her films. Looking at her filmography, a horror movie that I hadn’t seen stood out: 1987’s Dark Tower. Released six years after American Werewolf, but for some reason she only made one other film in that period.

Looking further into Dark Tower, I found that it is generally quite derided as a turkey, but I also found out that it had been released on blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome, so that imbued it with some promise, and as luck would have it, within a month or so I was able to avail myself of a relatively inexpensive second-hand copy.

The plot concerns a newly constructed tower block in Barcelona at which a series of mysterious deaths occur. The security manager is called in to investigate and becomes convinced that something spooky is afoot, so he calls in a paranormal investigator.

I enjoyed Dark Tower, but I can understand why it is not widely appreciated. In conventional terms, the entire execution is pretty lackluster. The cast, which includes a few familiar faces in addition to Jenny Agutter, struggles with a clunky script that frequently relies on them speaking their thoughts aloud, either as a voiced-over internal monologue, or actually out loud into a dictaphone or something like that. In one scene the parapsychologist walks alone through the building and narrates his whole back-story to the unseen “ghost.” As he walks about, he keeps pulling out what is clearly an electronic body temperature thermometer from his breast pocket to check for atmospheric temperature fluctuations, which would indicate a supernatural presence. “Temperature 67 degrees Fahrenheit,” he proclaims. No my friend, that’s actually the temperature inside your pocket… At one point in the movie I watched jealously as the parapsychologist offers a woman visiting his office a glass of wine, which he pours from what looks like some kind of ancient waxen vessel (well, he is a parapsychologist, after all). “You married?” he asks her. “No, I prefer to drink instead,” she replies archly. One of several near non-sequiturs in the script.

 

Some key plot developments are presented in ways that are so opaque or incongruous that, although I was stone-cold sober, I had to rewind several times to figure out what had happened. I guess if had been drinking I probably would just not have cared and just let it roll on. Some shots are repeatedly re-used, such as Jenny Agutter’s character being chased down a corridor and one shot of an elevator ascending and descending from the same angle that I’m sure I saw about ten times in the course of the film.

 

For me though, those aspects, and the strangely disjointed dialogue served to give the film a hypnotic, trance-like other-worldly quality. The film also had a strangely bleak oppressive atmosphere considering it was shot in Barcelona. I think that was largely down to the drab cinematography and the music. I personally greatly appreciated those aspects, though. I was almost reminded of Jean Rollin’s Night of the Hunted (1980), another strange low-budget "tower block gothic" from the 80s that I watched fairly recently. I can easily imagine myself revisiting Dark Tower in order to immerse myself again in that peculiar, dreary, but strangely comforting atmosphere.