Multiple maniacs during a powercut slasher film Alone In The Dark (1982) features dear old Donald Pleasence at his most free-wheeling and jocular, playing Dr. Leo Bain, the head psychiatrist at an asylum where treatment is a journey, a voyage of self-discovery. In his corduroy suit and Adidas trainers, Donald has obviously been touched by the psychedelic brush of hippydom, and still lives by those tenets, not least when he fills a pipe with ‘Oregon Sensimillia’ and puffs away in front of a bemused junior doctor (played by Dwight Schulz, Howling Mad Murdoch from The A-Team, ironically the sanest character in the film).
Donald plays Bain as a cuddly, enthusiastic, sensitive, supremely eccentric man: someone who could just as easily be inmate as overseer. Bain is clearly a mickey take of R.D Laing, and his nuthouse is a haven where the patients are encouraged to find their own cure – or not, it’s entirely up to them. This liberal attitude proves to be his undoing, unfortunately, as it turns out that psychotic maniacs (played by a wildly wigged Martin Landau and the always terrifying Jack Palance, amongst others) just aren't that easy going.
