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They tried to make a movie/video and they failed
When I was resident expert, hard to believe nearly four decades ago, on horror movies at Variety, budding filmmakers would routinely visit me and pick my brain. To name-drop, Raimi, Tapert and Campbell showed up together to chat about their 16mm feature ("Evil Dead") in post-production, still unfinished. My advice back then was to avoid shooting on video - go for making a real movie. I've always felt that way about what was christened Independent Cinema, but times have changed and nobody listened then let alone now!
So with "Dark Light" we have would-be filmmakers from Ireland, who a decade earlier had made a zombie video. Still at it six years later, they made this amateur followup, acting and taking all the behind-the-camera functions, just like backyard movies have been made dating back to Don Glut's endless series of short subjects of the '50s.
Buried on one of those omnibus horror DVD packages (up to 50 titles at a crack) from Mill Creek, it got dumped on American audiences with barely any reaction. That's because, as I foresaw decades earlier, these amateur efforts cranked out by the ten thousands around the world, are headed nowhere. It is an inkling of professionalism (for example, what Spielberg saw in my least favorite of all filmmakers Lars von Trier when he decided to back him on the basis of "The Element of Crime" or what the honchos at Columbia Pictures found exciting about Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi") that can get your foot in the show biz door. The rest of this fan boy junk is just juvenalia, mere noise in the system.
Which brings me back to "Dark Light", much ado about nothing. The would-be auteurs have concocted a threadbare action story about science gone awry with lots of running around and poor action or effects sequences and nary a hint of understanding concerning characterization. Running a little over an hour it is tedious and uninteresting. And for its target audience there is a singular lack of delivery of "the goods" - no sex, no nudity, no gore, no gross-outs, no low humor, no nothing.
Of course there is a steady audience out there of arrested-development folk who will watch anything about vampires or zombies, the two subject matters of this Irish group's two features. It took me many years to grow out of that syndrome, after watching thousands of third-rate horror and fantasy films, but at least they were films -even the direct-to-videos were shot on film back when.
Set in Belfast at "Altona Biological Research Institute", the feature has all the cornball elements of a bad action movie. Guys dressed in military outfits, an urban terrorist practicing his martial arts, a hero with marital problems at home, both scientists and soldiers up to no good, vampires, with a flashback story dating back to 327 A.D., , etc. Film's key issue is that curing their "can't go out in daylight" problem would give the vampires the upper hand against straight humanity.
One novelty is the use of "blood bukkake" (my invented term) as a vampire-turning mechanism rather than the traditional neck-biting. Pornographers could have gotten some sexploitation mileage out of that concept, but not here. In fact, later in the video they revert to a bite on the neck, purely cornball.
Much ado about an antidote to create sunlight-resistant vampires ends in a nonsensical finish, likely to irritate even easily pleased fans who have stuck with the preceding absurdity.
Needless to say, this group shows no ability as actors or filmmakers and inevitably went on to find some honest profession to put food on the table, leaving dreams of Show Biz on the shelf. I stopped watching these compendiums of poorly-made horror video from BCI or Mill Creek years ago, after one or two too many from the master of incompetence Bill Zebub.
So with "Dark Light" we have would-be filmmakers from Ireland, who a decade earlier had made a zombie video. Still at it six years later, they made this amateur followup, acting and taking all the behind-the-camera functions, just like backyard movies have been made dating back to Don Glut's endless series of short subjects of the '50s.
Buried on one of those omnibus horror DVD packages (up to 50 titles at a crack) from Mill Creek, it got dumped on American audiences with barely any reaction. That's because, as I foresaw decades earlier, these amateur efforts cranked out by the ten thousands around the world, are headed nowhere. It is an inkling of professionalism (for example, what Spielberg saw in my least favorite of all filmmakers Lars von Trier when he decided to back him on the basis of "The Element of Crime" or what the honchos at Columbia Pictures found exciting about Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi") that can get your foot in the show biz door. The rest of this fan boy junk is just juvenalia, mere noise in the system.
Which brings me back to "Dark Light", much ado about nothing. The would-be auteurs have concocted a threadbare action story about science gone awry with lots of running around and poor action or effects sequences and nary a hint of understanding concerning characterization. Running a little over an hour it is tedious and uninteresting. And for its target audience there is a singular lack of delivery of "the goods" - no sex, no nudity, no gore, no gross-outs, no low humor, no nothing.
Of course there is a steady audience out there of arrested-development folk who will watch anything about vampires or zombies, the two subject matters of this Irish group's two features. It took me many years to grow out of that syndrome, after watching thousands of third-rate horror and fantasy films, but at least they were films -even the direct-to-videos were shot on film back when.
Set in Belfast at "Altona Biological Research Institute", the feature has all the cornball elements of a bad action movie. Guys dressed in military outfits, an urban terrorist practicing his martial arts, a hero with marital problems at home, both scientists and soldiers up to no good, vampires, with a flashback story dating back to 327 A.D., , etc. Film's key issue is that curing their "can't go out in daylight" problem would give the vampires the upper hand against straight humanity.
One novelty is the use of "blood bukkake" (my invented term) as a vampire-turning mechanism rather than the traditional neck-biting. Pornographers could have gotten some sexploitation mileage out of that concept, but not here. In fact, later in the video they revert to a bite on the neck, purely cornball.
Much ado about an antidote to create sunlight-resistant vampires ends in a nonsensical finish, likely to irritate even easily pleased fans who have stuck with the preceding absurdity.
Needless to say, this group shows no ability as actors or filmmakers and inevitably went on to find some honest profession to put food on the table, leaving dreams of Show Biz on the shelf. I stopped watching these compendiums of poorly-made horror video from BCI or Mill Creek years ago, after one or two too many from the master of incompetence Bill Zebub.
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- lor_
- Apr 20, 2016
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- Runtime1 hour 7 minutes
- Color
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