Into the Darkness

Underground hero filmmaker David Kent-Watson's soon-to-be cult S. O. V slasher begins quite splendidly with a lurid sequence featuring a distressed young boy unpleasantly witnessing his somewhat degenerated mother selling her less than desirous body, thereby bluntly suggesting that our energetically stalking P. O. V-centric killer has a grievous case of 'Mommy Dearest' issues, and the prognosis looks pretty terminal for any women that remind him of his slattern matriarch!

The 'G. B. H' director's archetypal slasher shifts to altogether sunnier climes where boorish alpha male photographer Jeff Conti (John Saint Ryan) takes a titillating troupe of lusciously lissome lovelies to sun-blanched, appropriately picture perfect Malta for a racy fashion shoot, leeringly overseen by impish agent, the wickedly unsavoury David Beckett (Donald Pleasence) where with agreeable, if relatively bloodless regularity some unknown, model-hacking aggressor violently unleashes his poorly repressed madness and proceeds to wantonly P. O. V these delectably beach-beautiful, bikini-clad babes to death!

What might have been a conspicuously dreadful, low budget, shot-on-video, gore-less bore proved itself to be a modestly macabre slasher generously endowed with all the abundantly absurd trappings of bodacious B-Movie mania to raise it vaingloriously out of the muck-headed movie mire, while certainly no undiscovered VHS-ear classic, Kent-Watson's cheap as chutney, bucket-and-slayed, sun-stroked Mediterranean massacre is quite demonstratively a so-bad-it's-good, Pizza N' Leer, stalk n' slash cheese-fest. 'Into The Darkness' is made ever more appetizing by crusty horror icon Donald Pleasence's resplendently sleazy performance as the disreputable David Beckett, the sublime Maltese locations and a surprisingly effective score by Vic Emerson with some additionally fine music by guitar master Chris Rea.

Filmed on video directly to video, this movie has every cliché in the book. A serial-killer is stalking models on an "exotic" island. Donald Pleasence (and his real life daughter!) is trying to find out who the killer is. This movie goes under the category "So bad it´s not even funny". I give it a * out of *****.

A serial killer is preying on a group of models working on a sunny Malta.The plot of David Kent Watson's "Into the Darkness" is fairly routine and the killings are mostly bloodless.The script is obviously inspired by John Carpenter's horror hit "Halloween".The leads are surprisingly likable and accessible although a little more character building certainly would be welcomed.Overall,"Into the Darkness" does manage to save itself from the depths of mediocrity.It's certainly amateurish but I can't help but feel impressively eerie mostly because of the simple yet effective score.If you are into low-budget slasher movies give this extremely rare title a chance.Now I need to find "Creature of Comfort" with Donald Pleasence!