Dark Is the Night

James Avalon brings class back to Wicked Pictures, with his second film noir feature for the label. He takes all major credits (writer, director, editor and camera) and scores high marks all around.

Maintaining a serious mood, high style and suspense throughout, Avalon also relies on a concise screenplay, positing the reliable noir plot of a mysterious stranger, unfaithful characters, and plenty of treachery to go around. Seth Gamble shows up as a new boarder when the married couple Kenna James and Nathan Bronson are suffering money troubles, and Kenna is suffering through her hubby's infidelity and mean disposition.

Avalon makes clever use of a shifting time frame and questionable loyalties en route to a violent and twisty finish. Small cast stays in character and underplay their acting nicely, while pulling out all the stops in vivid sex scenes. In line with current audience preferences, Avalon delivers the requisite set of four half-hour XXX scenes, balanced by story material, adding up to a 2-1/2 hour running time; earlier Wicked features in this genre might time out to 90 minutes with sex scenes formerly running more like 10 minutes each.

Kenna James is especially effective in the lead role, and interesting casting has a nearly identical type blonde femme Kiara Cole as "the other woman".

Time frame is not tied down definitively: costumes, home decorations (right down to vintage telephone and vacuum cleaner) suggest 1940s or 1950s, but a modern car is used.

I was fascinated with little touches: movie opens with an LP being placed on the record player -on close inspection it bore an impulse! Jazz label, inscribed as John Coltrane's 1964 classic "A Love Supreme", but the music heard was more of a 1940s sound. A note pad filled with names and money amounts, implying criminal actitivity by Bronson's character has "James Avalon" and "Shaun of the Dead" among the names.

Film noir is one of my favorite genres, so I felt like Wicked's noir imprint would be a good entry point into adult films (gotta start somewhere, right?). Like Duplicity before it, Dark Is the Night comprises four sex scenes (plus a short solo) anchoring a simple plot that revolved around a couple of noir's most common themes: marital infidelity and blackmail. Given that this is porn, my story expectations aren't anywhere near what they would be for a mainstream film. Storywise, this did what it needed to do and not much more. If I were to compare the two, I think that Duplicity did this a little better. However, Dark Is the Night has an even more assured style/aesthetic, and the technical qualities were a little better across the board (including the sound). The sex scenes went on a little longer than I would have liked, but they were artfully shot and sufficiently arousing. Overall, I liked this about the same as Duplicity. I have a feeling that I'll end up enjoying Golden Age stuff more, but these initial two were still pretty good.