The last ride you'll ever take!
We saved a seat for you.
Dark Ride is a 2006 slasher horror movie, originally featured in the After Dark Horror Fest annual film festival.
A group of six friends on a spring break road trip stop off at an amusement park attraction named 'Dark Ride', unaware that a psychopath who brutally murdered two girls, has just escaped a mental institution and is seeking refuge there.
The film is directed by Craig Singer and stars Alex Solowitz, Patrick Renna, Andrea Bogart, Jennifer Tisdale, Jamie-Lynn Sigler
This movie includes examples of:
- All Men Are Perverts: Bill, Steve and Jim often make crude sex jokes at the expense of the female characters.
- Asshole Victim: Both orderlies, after taunting Jonah in his cell at the asylum. One of them even gets a hole punched straight through his gut.
- Amusement Park of Doom: The titular Dark Ride attraction is the main setting of the movie.
- Bullying a Dragon: The aforementioned orderlies decide that it's a great idea to mess with the insane murderer in his asylum cell, even going so far as to throw raw meat at him. That's when he stands up and breaks out of his straitjacket.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: The few minutes that Jen spends sober seem to suggest this about her. Later after various substances are consumed, she’s the most airheaded of the six, and most oblivious/dismissive to any possible danger. How much of this is her personality and how much is the drugs is not clarified.
- Creepy Gas-Station Attendant: The old man in the gas station where they first stop for gas fits this trope like a glove.
- Faux Death: Cathy pretends to have her throat slit to prank her on-again-off-again boyfriend Steve. He doesn't take it well, and angrily storms off.
- Foreshadowing: Early in the movie, Bill has a brief freak-out when Steve teases him, startling everyone. This is our first warning that all may not be right with Bill. It really really is not.
- Hostile Hitchhiker: At first Jen appears to be one of these, but this is subverted as she isn't nearly as crazy as she seems to be.
- Lovable Jock: Jim, to some extent.
- Meaningful Appearance / Ms. Fanservice: Jen. All three women are attractive and dialogue says that they are sexually active, but only Jen shows up in a midriff bearing shirt, no bra and tiny shorts. Coincidentally, of the three women, she’s the only one interested in seducing someone inside the Dark Ride, and thus the only source of nudity in the film.
- Out with a Bang: Jen and Jim, while Jen is 'servicing' Jim in the basement of the ride, her head gets cut off as Jim climaxes.
- Slut-Shaming: Neither Cathy or Liz is particularly fond of Jen, with Liz calling her a slut once it’s evident that she’s run off with Jim.
- Spikes of Doom: Jonah, the masked killer and main antagonist of the movie is pushed into a wall covered in spikes at the climax of the movie, killing him instantly.
- The Movie Buff: Bill is one of these, constantly quoting and making movie references, much to the annoyance of his friends.
- Would Hurta Child:Indeed Joshua would and has.
- Woman Scorned: Cathy was not at all happy to walk in on Steve and his new fling, and decides to conspire with Bill to lure everyone to the Dark Ride … where she fakes her own death to get back at Steve.
