User Reviews

Nessa Hawkins plays Keri Walker, a crack addled prostitute who vaguely remembers killing her latest pick-up as he attempts to rape her. Sounds grim? It gets grimmer. For some reason we don't ever really find out, Walker is despised by all, even those who supply her drugs. So she enters into a sleazy 'safe house' where she is subjected to further horror and all kinds of degradation.

This is a micro-budget production, but every kind of distortion, jump cut and hallucinogenic imagery is used to take your mind off that. For example, the dialogue seems clumsily inserted at times, with a background static hiss, all of which cuts out when the line is spoken. Typical limitations of a low-budget film, or deliberate policy to further play with our senses? You decide! As a short film, it would work as a truly trippy, dark nightmare, but, even though the running time is only 1 hour and 17 minutes, the barrage of shouting and distortion eventually becomes confusing and the shocks lose their value.

Hawkins is excellent as the unfortunate, addicted Walker, her central performance giving us a welcome constant throughout the madness. The storyline, such as it is, exists at the beginning and isn't further explored until the end, where events aren't quite as she remembers. My theory, and this is a sizeable SPOILER, is that the 'safe house' is a doorway to hell, or death. As Walker finally fights back and rejects it, she regains and retains her life.

I want to like 'Dark Places' more than I do, because it uses its lack of budget to great effect and produces a cocktail of powerful twisted imagery. But there's too much style over substance. David C Hayes, who stars as Luther, an excessive owner of the 'safe house' and one of the more extreme characters we meet here, also co-writes. Interesting.

What makes a movie really great? When it touches some nerve or heartstrings. I am not a fan of low budget horror movies, but this movie effected and touched the darkest fears in my mind and I am a fan of the movie. I was asked to watch this movie friends had just finished watching it. It has to say something when 8 people will watch a movie and the rewind it and watch it from the beginning again.

The movie begins like a MTV music video gone bad. A young hooker hustles from car to car selling herself for her next fix. She gets picked up by a creep that attacks her. She defends herself by cutting him up with a razor blade and escapes to a bathroom where she is told that the police are looking for her. Stoned and confused she tries to find someplace to hideout but we soon find out that she isn't wanted anywhere and ends up at a crack house that she has never been to before. The house is run by a gay sadist that controls the freaks with drugs and violence and the people there seem to accept all this. The hooker is treated to a disgusting assortment of drug addicts both old and young, S & M porno, sideshows, and flashbacks to the attack that prevent her from knowing what is real and what isn't. She is befriended by one man who trades sex with the owner in order to let her stay, but when the time comes to pay up, the boy refuses. He is then bludgeoned by the sadist. The hooker witnesses this and follows the sadist as he dumps the body conveniently into a hole in his back yard. The hooker is discovered and also thrown into the hole, where she discovers the bodies of others and a friend that she separated from weeks before. She struggles out of the hole and back into the house, only to be attacked by the all the occupants of the house. She is rescued by the house madam only to be forced into her torture chamber. This girl is forced onto a bed and violated to the laughs of the people torturing her. I was so comfortable watching this, and I actually found myself crinching and covering my eyes. For this scene alone I would have to say that this movie is incredible. I thought after the movie was over and we discussed this and the reason why this scene and movie worked was that I connected with the character. Not being a drug addict or a prostitute, I felt for this women and I cared about her, which is the reason why some movies work and others don't. We cared about Jodie Foster in The Accused, and that is why the rape scene in that movie is so powerful. In this movie, when she is raped by two women no less, it is terrifying and powerful because it stirred emotions and left us feeling her fear and pain. Anyone making low budget horror movies can take a lesson from this movie and stop giving us the hack 2 dimensional characters that get killed off and nobody cares.

Dark Places continues with the hooker back on the streets, free of the people that hurt her and trying to again find a safe place to hide. After a visit with the police and what seems like a new beginning, we see exactly what happened in the car that night with the creep that attacked her. The roles were reversed and it was the hooker that was cut and left for dead, but just like her night in the crack house, she is a survivor and revives herself to find out the everything she thought she endured she only did to save alive. The demons of this house were only there to make her accept her death, and the madam only needed to kiss her to make that happen. She fought off death with the same blade that was used to kill her. It ends letting us know that it did happen to her and the lines between life and death are the same as the line between reality and dreams and that even a person that has fallen to the lowest place can be a survivor.

I give hugs to Nessa Hawkins for taking me on her journey, making me care for her, hurt with her and returning me safe and sound.