Other viewers of this would-be thriller seem unconcerned by the brainless illogicality of much of the plot. Heroine Molly (Natasha Parry) inadvertently glimpses villain (unnamed, played by Maxwell Reed) just after he has shot dead a taxi driver. She's too far away to recognise him again (and vice versa, presumably) but the police naturally appeal for this mystery girl to come forward. Somehow (I missed exactly how) the villain knows how to trace her from details released by the press, and thus the plot is set in motion: the police must giver her round-the-clock protection, whilst Reed must try to kill her. Unfortunately, neither are very good at their tasks: 'round-the-clock' protection becomes 'some-of-the clock', and Reed traps her alone in her flat. All he now has to do is to callously kill her, as with his previous victims, but - as with so many such cheapo films of the genre - he decides instead to leave her alone with the gas on, suggesting suicide. Why? - so that she survives, and the story can continue - beyond that it makes no sense for a ruthless killer to try to pretend that his victim has not been ruthlessly killed. (And he'll never be caught anyway, because he has cunningly shaved off his moustache, changing his appearance entirely.) Once he has turned the gas on, Molly's phone rings, so what doe he do? He answers it - of course he does, because he's an idiot. The detective (uncharismatic, twenty years too old to be the love interest, Edward Underwood) assigned to protect Molly gives her explicit instructions from the start: 'Don't go out alone, you're not safe,' which she interprets as permission to seek out the remotest bit of beach she can find for a spot of solitary sunbathing. A man in a suit appears to follow her, and sits fifty metres away - is it the killer? we can't tell. It's either a man in a suit having a walk in the middle of nowhere (as any man in a suit might do) or, more likely, it's the murderer, practising how not to kill someone. It all ends at Dungeness, where, despite the army on shooting practice, a temporary hostage situation, a lighthouse, and one of those shoot-outs in which each gunman wastes bullets with shots that can't possibly hit their target, there is absolutely zero tension or suspense whatsoever. Eventually, the killer gets shot. and puts all out of our misery. A bog-standard cast under-uses the ever-reliable William Hartnell, the script gives Sam Kydd precisely one line, and makes poor Molly fall in love, on page two, with a policeman who could be her boring uncle, who she usually only has to put up with at Christmas. Four stars for the scenes of Hastings and its neighbouring areas.
Review of The Dark Man
