Passed the Door of Darkness starts as rookie detective Chris Malloy (Matthew Prater) fresh faced & just out of school begins his first day on the job, he is teamed up with his idol the hard nosed cynical detective Murphy MacCasey (co-writer Mark Colson) who has seen it all over the years. They are called to a terrible scene, a house where a man & his two children lay dead, then soon after another bizarre crime scene faces them when MacCasey's daughter Laura (Kathryn Avery Hansen) has the unfortunate experience of walking into her house & blowing her boyfriends head off with a shotgun that was rigged to go off as the door was opened. A killer is on the loose, a killer who sets deadly traps that innocent people set off & kill someone close to them thus turning them into killers. It's up to MacCasey & Malloy to find the killer before they strike again but there may be more to the case than they first thought as suspicion's turn closer to home...
Co-written & directed by Peter Mervis under the pseudonym Traxler Mervis I got the impression that Passed the Door of Darkness was trying to be a Se7en (1995) or a The Silence of the Lambs (1991) style serial killer mystery thriller but doesn't have any of the things that made those two films absolute solid gold classics & is a rather miserable overlong little film in it's own right. First of all I have no idea why it's called Passed the Door of Darkness as there's no doors in it & there's nothing supernatural in it either. The script is poor here with the serial killer aspects all but disappearing in the second half as it focuses on the relationship between MacCasey, his daughter & Malloy which is deathly dull & when the film does kick back into serial killer thriller mode there's a ridiculous twist ending which is barely explained & makes no sense like why didn't he remember committing the murders before but suddenly does or why he then decides to almost randomly commit suicide himself or what his motives were. It smacks of a twist ending for the sake of a twist ending because that's what an audience would expect with very little thought behind it & ultimately I don't think it works or satisfies on a dramatic level. The character's are awful with some of the worst clichés I've seen in a while, I mean the fresh faced young idealistic cop right out of college who thinks he knows everything gets paired up with an embittered cynical veteran who teaches the kid the realities of life, oh please come on as if we haven't seen this a thousand times before & here it's very poorly realised with paper thin characterisation which is another reason why the twist ending just falls flat & feels stupid.
There's a couple of mildly gory moments here, a man has his face blown off, there's a decapitated head, a woman has her arm chopped off with a machete & then the wound is burned closed before a bomb is placed in her mouth & her head goes bang. I have actually probably made it sound gorier than it is & the film doesn't focus on the gore or the murders that much & at times you can forget your watching a film that's supposed to be about a serial killer. There definitely nothing scary here & the entire film looks like a cheap point & shoot made for telly effort with no style whatsoever.
I would have though Passed the Door of Darkness was a low budget film & the production values are cheap with a cop station that consists of two rooms & no cops other than the two detectives are ever seen there. The acting is really poor here which just makes the thing even more of a chore to sit through & means it has even less impact.
Passed the Door the Darkness is a boring serial killer thriller with bad character's, a bad twist ending & it feels like it goes on forever while your watching it. The thriller elements are rubbish, the horror elements are crap & the sub soap opera style dramatics are just dull. One to avoid.
Co-written & directed by Peter Mervis under the pseudonym Traxler Mervis I got the impression that Passed the Door of Darkness was trying to be a Se7en (1995) or a The Silence of the Lambs (1991) style serial killer mystery thriller but doesn't have any of the things that made those two films absolute solid gold classics & is a rather miserable overlong little film in it's own right. First of all I have no idea why it's called Passed the Door of Darkness as there's no doors in it & there's nothing supernatural in it either. The script is poor here with the serial killer aspects all but disappearing in the second half as it focuses on the relationship between MacCasey, his daughter & Malloy which is deathly dull & when the film does kick back into serial killer thriller mode there's a ridiculous twist ending which is barely explained & makes no sense like why didn't he remember committing the murders before but suddenly does or why he then decides to almost randomly commit suicide himself or what his motives were. It smacks of a twist ending for the sake of a twist ending because that's what an audience would expect with very little thought behind it & ultimately I don't think it works or satisfies on a dramatic level. The character's are awful with some of the worst clichés I've seen in a while, I mean the fresh faced young idealistic cop right out of college who thinks he knows everything gets paired up with an embittered cynical veteran who teaches the kid the realities of life, oh please come on as if we haven't seen this a thousand times before & here it's very poorly realised with paper thin characterisation which is another reason why the twist ending just falls flat & feels stupid.
There's a couple of mildly gory moments here, a man has his face blown off, there's a decapitated head, a woman has her arm chopped off with a machete & then the wound is burned closed before a bomb is placed in her mouth & her head goes bang. I have actually probably made it sound gorier than it is & the film doesn't focus on the gore or the murders that much & at times you can forget your watching a film that's supposed to be about a serial killer. There definitely nothing scary here & the entire film looks like a cheap point & shoot made for telly effort with no style whatsoever.
I would have though Passed the Door of Darkness was a low budget film & the production values are cheap with a cop station that consists of two rooms & no cops other than the two detectives are ever seen there. The acting is really poor here which just makes the thing even more of a chore to sit through & means it has even less impact.
Passed the Door the Darkness is a boring serial killer thriller with bad character's, a bad twist ending & it feels like it goes on forever while your watching it. The thriller elements are rubbish, the horror elements are crap & the sub soap opera style dramatics are just dull. One to avoid.