The film is more of a true crime police procedural story than a horror film. There are elements of a horror film in Town, but on the whole the film falls more in line with America's Most Wanted than anything that could be considered scary. The film even includes narration throughout, intermittently popping in to give us backstories for characters. It's kind of jarring; opening narration is not uncommon in movies, but to have it pop in during the middle feels out of place. Due to the low budget and the true crime approach, the film feels more like a TV movie that managed to get a theatrical release.
I'm not against the idea of making a police procedural/horror hybrid. It worked well for the Hannibal TV show. Unfortunately, the focus is almost entirely on the police force going through banal routine police activities. Perhaps taking a page from The Last House on the Left's redneck cops, the filmmakers decided to have a comic relief character named Sparkplug. This Barney Fife wannabe lopes around, doing zany things such as dumping out a drawer full of things in search of car keys, or driving a police car into a lake. He is an irritating character that detracts from any dramatic weight the movie may have had.
When the movie remembers that it also features a masked madman and not just wacky cops, it goes into horror mode. The horror-centric scenes are par for the course if you have ever seen a slasher movie. Teens in cars on lover's lane are subjected to such cliches as "Wait, I think I heard something" and worn-out jump-scares. Granted, this movie predates the slasher subgenre, but the cliches were still overused even then. Speaking of slasher movies, the killer is a man wearing a sack as a mask, which Friday the 13th Part 2 clearly ripped off for Jason's appearance in the film. There's nothing particularly frightening or even intimidating about the villain, so the horror scenes feel dull and seem to drag. Strangely, the killer uses a pistol. For all the variety of weaponry used in horror movies, this is the only film I have seen where the killer brandishes a gun. Even stranger, the one time the killer decides to not use his gun, he creates an impromptu trombone-knife. The scene is truly bizarre. One of his victims is a trombone player returning home from a school dance. The killer finds his victim's trombone, tests it to see if it works, ties his knife to it, and then tests it again before stabbing them. I don't know how the filmmakers expected anyone to be horrified or repulsed by this scene. It's by far the only thing memorable about the film, it's so absurd.
The film's ending is also disappointingly anticlimactic. In the film's only truly exciting moment, the police finally catch up to the killer and have a shootout. The chase leads the police into the outskirts of a swamp. The killer is shot in the leg, but manages to escape when a train comes down the track and impedes the police from following him. And then the movie ends. The film is loosely based on a true story, and the killer really did escape in real life, never to be found. But the movie didn't seem to care about factual accuracy at any other point in the movie, so they could have at least fudged the facts and made a more interesting ending.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown is an unfortunate dud. The idea of a police procedural/horror combo is promising, but the movie fails to deliver in either department. The policework is boring, and the horror scenes aren't creepy or thrilling. The characters are one-dimensional and boring, and the visuals aren't interesting either. It's a dull affair all the way through, save for that bizarre trombone-knife scene. If you are a die-hard horror fan interested in seeing a proto-slasher of sorts, be forewarned, this is a dull watch. Everyone else, don't even bother.
