Dark Queen

So what specific Mr. Hyde-like effects does drinking the psychic brain fluid from a mass murderer have on the bookish lady scientist, you ask? For starters, she magically develops dark blue eye shadow, red lipstick, rouge on her cheeks, and silver nail polish. It corrects her vision so that she no longer needs those bookish glasses. It inspires her to let her hair down and dress in a leather two-piece number so that she looks like someone at a Xena convention. She develops the ability to wield unspecified and unexplained blasts of light. Most importantly, she develops the personality of a megalomaniac sex kitten capable of controlling the minds of others and has a psychic link to the mass murderer, who actively encourages her new persona to aid him in his quest to destroy the very fabric of human civilization. That's some formula, huh?

Dark Queen is an astoundingly bad take on the traditional Jeckyll and Hyde theme that is practically boiling over with laughably bad acting and howlingly bad dialogue. If not for the occasional moments of stupefying badness, there would be absolutely nothing redeeming about the movie whatsoever. It's just dreadful on every level. The script is total gibberish, the directing is utterly lifeless, the acting is embarrassingly amateurish, and the quality of the production values often go back and forth between looking professional and looking like a public access television production. Even though Dark Queen was obviously meant to be campy that still doesn't change the fact that the only really amusing moments are so for unintentional reasons.

Okay, the movie does have one other thing going for it – breasts. Then again, even though just about every major female character pops her top at least once there's still a shocking lack of sex in this movie, and that strikes me as being especially odd since the plot is seemingly tailor made for a film of the Cinemax After Dark variety. It just feels like it should constantly devolve into soft core sex scenes that go on for several minutes at a time. I wish it did, not just to see ample flesh bumping and grinding but also because it would have cut down on the seemingly endless amount of dull talky scenes and general lameness of the production. This is a movie with very little action going on and not just of the sexy variety.

Lets start with the good news. Dark Queen is not The Asylum's worst, and not quite bad enough to be down there. It is reasonably entertaining in how unintentionally funny some of the scenes are, and the profanity has a kind of sexiness to it. That is it for the good news though. When people say that there are worse Asylum movies, very often that is saying very little, and that is the case with Dark Queen. In every other department, which is almost all actually, it is a disaster of a movie. On a visual and technical level, Dark Queen looks really poor, with some of the most haphazard camera work I've seen in any movie recently and lighting that exudes no atmosphere whatsoever. To say that the special effects are second-rate is an understatement, they do look as though they were made in less than 10 minutes and for £5. The dialogue is horrendous, giving the feeling that it was made up on the spot- I wouldn't be all that surprised if that were the case- and the story is dull and also incomprehensible. The direction is so laborious that you question whether there is any direction at all, while the characters have no likability or development to them. It is difficult to think of negative adjectives to describe the acting, other than to say that amateurish is an insult. Overall, not worth watching. 2/10 Bethany Cox