Dark Sanity (Martin Green, 1982)

There ain't no (dark) sanity clause, so proceed at your own risk with the 1982 straight-to-video accidental avant-garde art object known as Dark Sanity, a movie that attempts to be a psychological horror film about psychic premonitions of murder but accidentally delivers one hour and 28 minutes of the opposite of its title. Yeah, I'm talking about light insanity, baby.

Unlike most of the general population, I have an enormously high tolerance for movies like Dark Sanity. But what exactly is a movie like Dark Sanity? It's hard to explain, but, like a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, you know it when you see it. I'm talking about movies that make you feel like you've been kicked in the head by a horse seconds before hitting play on the remote. These are movies made by people attempting to deliver a routine piece of filmed entertainment within an existing genre with actors who are supposed to deliver a narrative in recognizable, believable ways, but through incompetence, inexperience, eccentricity, delusion, and/or lack of awareness (and hopefully all of the above), the filmmakers instead produce a deliriously weird movie-ish thing that only very loosely resembles something from our shared existence. I'm not talking about movies made by normies trying too hard to be weird or by weirdos legitimately being themselves. I'm talking about the special kind of weird. The weird made by people who think they're normal and think they're making a conventional movie but are instead inadvertently unlocking the cages in the zoo inside their minds.

Speaking of zoos (a nonsensical transition but just roll with it in the spirit of the film), Dark Sanity is the story of a young couple moving into new digs in Los Angeles after some unfortunate business went down in their old hometown of San Diego. Karen Nichols (Kory Clark) is a recovering alcoholic who also has occasional psychic visions. Her husband Al (Chuck Jamison) is a recently promoted low-level sales exec and quite possibly the worst husband ever portrayed on film. Many celluloid husbands have committed worse deeds, but they're all somehow more tolerable than Al. You just want to punch him from his first appearance until his last, and it is a major failing of Dark Sanity that you never get to see this chump get his head chopped off. Somehow Al has failed to inform his vulnerable wife that their nice new middle-class home was the site of a murder. The mentally ill son of the previous homeowner sliced up his mom (or did he?), and her head has never been found (or has it?).

Karen starts getting horrible psychic visions of murder in the new home, with Al showing absolutely no sympathy, accusing her of getting back on the sauce and of potentially ruining his new job prospects. This Al guy, I tell ya. I give him no respect. No regard, neither. Karen's mental state is not helped by the neighborhood kooks. Her busybody neighbor Madge (Bobbie Holt) shows up on day one and immediately starts ordering her around and giving her the local gossip. Madge's husband Henry (Andy Gwyn) is a leering, ogling creep. And a weirdo named Benny (Timothe McCormack) walks into her home uninvited to use the bathroom. Madge badgers Karen into giving Benny a job as a gardener and handyman. I would hate this neighborhood.

Besides all this neighborly drama, a strange man named Larry Craig (Aldo Ray, the only professional actor in the cast and the only one who got paid — more on that later) is following Karen around. He parks outside the house and watches her. He's in the parking lot of the grocery store. He's at her AA meeting. He follows her into a dive bar when she hurriedly leaves the AA meeting. Larry is fortunately not another weirdo, but an ex-detective with similar psychic visions. He warns Karen about the house and makes her feel less alone about her own clairvoyant powers. Of course, Al is a giant dick to him. Fuckin' Al, man. This guy is pushing me, baby. Hashtag cancel Al.

The plot gets a bit more complicated, with black cats, more premonitions, visits to institutions, discussions on the comedic merits of the Three Stooges and Cheech and Chong, a disastrous dinner with the boss and his wife, a viewing of the soap opera The Young Doctors, dive bar disagreements, TV news crews, more severed head business, job demotions, smashed whiskey bottles, Al continuing to be an asshole, homicide detectives, attempted beheadings, and rude talk about ladies' butts. You get a little bit of everything except coherence.

Dark Sanity takes a unique approach to almost everything, reinventing the rulebook when it comes to camera angles, sound design, dialogue, and character behavior. The acting is neither good nor bad in any conventional sense. It just is. I feel like you're getting the essence of the humans playing these roles in ways that have nothing to do with film acting or a lack of film acting. The dialogue is crystal clear but sounds like it's being beamed in from loudspeakers instead of coming out of the mouths of the characters. The things they say to each other sound like the English language but don't feel like it. Everything is off in ways that are hard to describe, but it's all poetry to me, man. I can't believe so many of these weird little film objects exist.

Director/producer Martin Green is a one-and-done mystery man. The other two credits on his imdb page are most likely a different guy with the same name. As mentioned earlier, Aldo Ray was the only guy who worked on the movie to get a paycheck. A veteran actor who bounced around from legit Hollywood and indie roles to DIY insanity like Dark Sanity, Ray was experienced enough to get paid in advance. The other cast and crew members got stiffed, with Green and his co-producers disappearing after the film was shot. The actors and crew didn't know what happened to the movie until it appeared on video store shelves. Green never directed again. God, I'd love an extensive oral history of how this whole Dark Sanity thing happened.

What can I tell you? This movie exists, and I'm glad it does. People made this for some reason. Actual, real people. You know deep down in your guts if you're the kind of person who needs a little Dark Sanity in your life. There aren't many of us, but we'll always be here, in the corner of the room where words like "good" and "bad" have lost all meaning. Get darkly sane, dudes.