If ever there's a forgotten genre classic, the 1976 flick The Town That Dreaded Sundown has to be one of them. I know that's a bold out-of-the-gate statement for a critic, but that's how I felt after viewing director Charles B. Pierce's retelling of a chilling true-crime story.

Once there was a movie called Jaws, and it featured a shark killing innocent swimmers. That was back in 1975, and it was a huge hit. A year later, a movie came out called Grizzly, and it featured a grizzly bear killing innocent campers and hikers. Suffice to say, it was the highest grossing independent movie of 1976. I was intrigued by Grizzly as a boy, because the movie's poster was featured on the back of comic books everywhere, and it looked great, especially to a pre-teen boy. How does the movie stack up now that I'm a middle-age man?

I have been a fan of this movie for a long time. I watched this with my Mom when I was a kid and its always struck a chord. It is based the true story of a series of murders dubbed the “Texarkana Moonlight Murders” in 1946. The movie is a documentary style telling of this series of murders, still unsolved to this day. What I like is that you see the POV of the killer and of the police trying to catch him. It seems like a slice of life after the war, men starting their lives after serving. A general sense of peace surrounding the community and a killer moves in and turns that peace into fear. His main targets were young couples parked out in the local lovers lane.