There might be spoilers here. Gonna try to keep from it but I have to describe the plot as I heard it verses what it really was when I saw the film. THE NIGHT DIGGER, also known as THE ROAD BUILDER, was a movie I read about that sounded interesting. It seems a spinster and her mother are in an old decaying mansion in England when a young man comes along to stay with them and work as a handy man while also working as a builder on a road being constructed. It seems this young guy is a psycho who also rapes and kills women and buries them in the road. Meanwhile the spinster is taking a shine to him. Sounded like the recipe for a pretty good thriller to me. Well, in spite of Bernard Herrmann's score and Alex Thompson's excellent, moody cinematography, this film doesn't play out anything like I thought it would have. The plot takes detours that really made me wonder if the director knew he was supposed to be making a horror film. There comes one part that has several people sitting around gossiping and although I imagined a suspenseful thriller where you wondered if the old woman and her mother are in danger, someone, maybe the director, or maybe Roald Dahl pretty much succeed in killing any degree of suspense. It's almost like they decided to shoot a scary movie and then later tried to turn it into something else altogether. It has gloomy cinematography and a fine score and even a kind of threatening title but that's where the horror/suspense elements end. The movie fizzles badly and the climax is just plain stupid. Maybe I was supposed to be moved or sympathetic or something but I just thought the movie was creepy for all the wrong reasons. BEWARE! BIG SPOILER!!!!
Still with me? Okay, there is a sex scene with the young man and old Patricia Neal. Luckily, you don't see much but just the thought of the young dude having sex with that old woman was about the creepiest thing I can think of in this entire movie. If she had been the young Patricia Neal from 20 years before this film was made, then fine, a sex scene might not have been so terrible but this was disgusting. When I read the title NIGHT DIGGER, I expected a movie where Patricia Neal discovers her handyman's is the murderer and her having to fight him off and struggle to survive. I imagined a pretty interesting plot when I read the title. Be assured that there is nothing in this film that is suspenseful, scary or thrilling unless you like watching old people have sex with young people, which is shot in front of a blurry lens, presumably to keep the audience from throwing up. Given the same exact actors, crew, locations and budget, I could have made a film that would have had audiences on the edge of their seats until the end credits. Someone took a good premise, a good crew, great locations, sets and actors and made a boring film about a guy who kills good-looking women and sleeps with old women who used to be good-looking. I wasn't impressed at all and cannot recommend this film - at least not as a thriller/horror film, which it was intended to be. No blood, no gore, no action. Just old ladies, psycho road-builders and boredom.
Still with me? Okay, there is a sex scene with the young man and old Patricia Neal. Luckily, you don't see much but just the thought of the young dude having sex with that old woman was about the creepiest thing I can think of in this entire movie. If she had been the young Patricia Neal from 20 years before this film was made, then fine, a sex scene might not have been so terrible but this was disgusting. When I read the title NIGHT DIGGER, I expected a movie where Patricia Neal discovers her handyman's is the murderer and her having to fight him off and struggle to survive. I imagined a pretty interesting plot when I read the title. Be assured that there is nothing in this film that is suspenseful, scary or thrilling unless you like watching old people have sex with young people, which is shot in front of a blurry lens, presumably to keep the audience from throwing up. Given the same exact actors, crew, locations and budget, I could have made a film that would have had audiences on the edge of their seats until the end credits. Someone took a good premise, a good crew, great locations, sets and actors and made a boring film about a guy who kills good-looking women and sleeps with old women who used to be good-looking. I wasn't impressed at all and cannot recommend this film - at least not as a thriller/horror film, which it was intended to be. No blood, no gore, no action. Just old ladies, psycho road-builders and boredom.