Introduction: Step Right Up to Disappointment
Every so often, a horror film comes along that makes you rethink your life choices—not because it’s scary, but because you wasted ninety minutes watching it when you could’ve been reorganizing your sock drawer. Dark Ride (2006), directed by Craig Singer, is one such masterpiece of mediocrity. Marketed as part of the “8 Films to Die For” festival, it’s less “to die for” and more “to nap through.”
It’s got everything: a group of cardboard college kids, a killer in a mask, an abandoned amusement park, and absolutely none of the suspense, atmosphere, or competence required to make those things scary.
If Haunted Mansion and Scooby-Doo had a child, and then left that child unattended in a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit for too long, it would grow up to be Dark Ride.
The Opening: Sisters, Screams, and Slicing Stomachs
The film kicks off with twin teenage girls, Sam and Colleen, wandering into the titular Dark Ride attraction. One is nervous, one is bossy—it’s Horror Movie Archetypes 101. The killer kidnaps them, slices one open, and brutally murders the other. And yet, even in this opening bloodbath, it feels like everyone’s half-asleep.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone butter toast: sure, something happened, but who cares?
The Characters: Human Mannequins on a Road Trip
Ten years later (because slashers apparently require decades-long gaps like wine cellars), we meet our main cast. And by “main cast,” I mean the poor souls doomed to deliver dialogue like it’s their first time reading English out loud.
-
Cathy (Jamie-Lynn Sigler): Our Final Girl. Imagine if Meadow Soprano decided to cosplay as Laurie Strode, but forgot to bring the acting chops.
-
Liz (Jennifer Tisdale): The hot friend who might as well have “dead meat” stamped on her forehead.
-
Bill (Patrick Renna): The chubby jokester whose cousins were killed in the Dark Ride—because trauma is funny, right?
-
Steve (David Clayton Rogers): Generic male friend #1.
-
Jim (Alex Solowitz): Generic male friend #2. He drives the van, so you know he’s doomed.
-
Jen (Andrea Bogart): The hitchhiker they pick up. Because every good horror film needs a “stranger who’s probably not insured.”
Every single one of them is as bland as rice cakes dipped in skim milk. Their idea of bonding? Smoking weed inside a condemned amusement ride. It’s like Darwinism decided to cast its own movie.
The Killer: Jonah the Diet Leatherface
Our villain, Jonah (David Warden), is an escaped mental patient who wears a mask, grunts occasionally, and murders people with all the flair of a bored butcher at closing time. He’s got the size of Michael Myers, the mask habit of Jason Voorhees, and the originality of a bootleg Halloween costume from Walmart.
Even his kills are lazy. Decapitation? Check. Stabbing? Check. Hook attack? Check. He’s basically a slasher starter pack without the charm. You half expect him to stop mid-kill and ask, “Is this working for you guys?”
The Setting: Haunted House of Yawns
Now, on paper, setting a slasher in an abandoned amusement park sounds great. Creepy animatronics, flickering lights, the endless potential for jump scares. In execution, however, Dark Ride makes the place about as spooky as a Chuck E. Cheese after closing.
The set design looks cheap, the scares are telegraphed from a mile away, and half the time you’re squinting at the screen wondering if this was filmed in someone’s garage. If Disney built this ride, it would be called “It’s a Small Death After All.”
The Death Scenes: Yawn, Repeat, Forget
Slashers live and die by their kills. Creative deaths are the lifeblood of the genre. Sadly, Dark Ride treats its murder scenes with the enthusiasm of a DMV employee on their sixth coffee break.
Take Jen’s decapitation: she’s in the basement giving Jim a blowjob (because of course she is) when Jonah pops out of a trapdoor and slices off her head. The camera cuts away so fast you wonder if the filmmakers forgot they were making a horror film and not a PSA about dental hygiene.
Or how about Steve’s corpse reveal? Instead of shocking or grotesque, it’s… there. Like a Halloween decoration from Spirit that went 70% off on November 1st.
The most memorable death is the cop who gets his head split in half with a machete—but memorable only because it’s the first moment you think, “Huh, maybe the gore budget finally arrived in the mail.”
The Twist: Brotherly Love and Lazy Writing
Ah, the big reveal: Bill, the group’s pudgy joker, is Jonah’s brother. That’s right—the killer has a sibling in the friend group. Because apparently, the Scream twist model was too complicated, so they just went with “Surprise! Family drama!”
Bill stabs Jim, thanks Cathy for unknowingly helping him, and dons Jonah’s mask like he’s auditioning for a Walmart ad: “When you can’t afford Jason Voorhees, accept no substitutes.”
It’s less of a twist and more of a shrug. You don’t gasp. You don’t scream. You just mutter, “Oh. Okay then.”
The Acting: Drama Club Dropouts
Jamie-Lynn Sigler tries to lead the charge, but it’s hard to be compelling when your dialogue sounds like it was written by a haunted Speak & Spell. Patrick Renna, forever the “fat kid from The Sandlot,” hams it up as Bill but quickly transitions from comic relief to comic tragedy. The others exist in a perpetual state of “attractive but clueless,” like Abercrombie mannequins left out in the sun too long.
Andrea Bogart (as Jen the hitchhiker) gets points for effort, but since her big scene involves servicing a guy in a basement, her contribution to cinema is… limited.
The Pacing: Like Waiting in Line for a Ride That Breaks Down
The biggest crime Dark Ride commits isn’t bad acting or cheap sets—it’s boredom. The movie plods along at a snail’s pace, padding itself with endless wandering through the attraction. You could cut thirty minutes from this and still have the same story, only slightly less painful.
Instead, you get long, meandering sequences of characters wandering down hallways, turning corners, and occasionally screaming at a rubber skeleton. It’s less Texas Chainsaw Massacre and more Scooby-Doo Without the Dog.
The Humor: Unintentional Comedy Gold
If you approach Dark Ride as a serious horror film, you’ll be disappointed. But if you treat it as a comedy? Oh boy, you’re in for a treat.
Jim knocking himself unconscious by running into a pipe? Comedy gold. Jonah creeping around like he’s lost his Uber? Hilarious. Bill suddenly turning into a slasher sidekick? Priceless.
It’s like watching a group project fall apart in real time—awkward, funny, and strangely relatable.
Final Verdict: The Ride’s Closed, Folks
Dark Ride had all the ingredients for a fun B-slasher: creepy setting, young cast, masked killer. But instead of delivering thrills, it serves up reheated leftovers from every better horror movie made in the last 30 years.
It’s not scary. It’s not clever. It’s barely coherent. The only thing horrifying about this film is that it convinced anyone to sit through it.
So here’s my advice: if you see the pamphlet for the Dark Ride reopening, do what a sane person would do—throw it away and go find a ferris wheel. At least then the only thing you’ll risk losing is your lunch.
