Darklight

This obvious pilot for an unproduced TV series features young Canadian actress Shiri Appleby as an amnesiac with some pretty incredible powers that must be put to use when a man-turned-flying demon is let loose on the world. The CGI is par for a TV job, and Appleby is OK as an amnesiac but hard to swallow as a superheroine. Familiar TV face Richard Burgi is along for the ride as Appleby's mentor, but he can do nothing to elevate this dreck above the mediocre level. We see way too much of the cartoonish flying demon right from the start, a bad sign. Also, the scenes where Burgi is training Appleby for battle are actually laughable. They are a bad copy of similar scenes in several other movies, most notably REMO WILLIAMS.

Shiri Appleby was adorable, sexy and cute in "Roswell". However her luminescent presence in this stinker couldn't save it. What the hell was THAT plot all about? A biblical backstory with so many plot loopholes you could drive a truck through them. When you create a mythology (especially using biblical references) delve a little more into what makes it tick and why.

Good actors are wasted. David Hewlett and John DeLancie were all wasted (Hewlett mostly, looking much thinner than he does in Stargate Atlantis). I knew this was going to suck when Hewlett's character takes off his shirt and puts on a black face mask to get an injection! LOL! Either the director sucked or the editor did, there are just too many scenes where the action looked very disjointed and out of place. Either a lack of coverage for the editor to work with or a crappy shooting style, you know a movie is bad when the action scenes from a student film are better choreographed. Also the CGI was about the same caliber as a good video game .... but this is a feature film! IN a movie, the CGI has to be better than something you'd pick up at a gamestore! The battle between Lilith and the Demonicos was laughably bad! Usually films that just seem stilted and weird are foreign films made with American actors where the director was suffering from cultural schizophrenia (i.e. being pulled into two different directions at the same time.) This movie had an American Director (albeit with little experience). He might get better in the future (either that or the suits came in, took it out of his hands and ruined it ... always a possibility!) The movie "could" have been good, with a decent script, better direction, better effects, better editing .... the ending was a setup for a sequel or series, but right now I wouldn't bet on it.

Sweet Shiri is all grown up now and still quite lovely, but she must have been desperate for money to do this film. It's clearly low-budget. There's something wrong with the audio. It's like everyone is speaking through some sound filter. Their voices just don't sound right. This movie is so bad only a heterosexual male fan of Shiri would want to see this film. Richard Bergi, John De Lancie, Richard Gnolfo, and David Hewlett do their best to support this lousy production, but still seeing and watching Shiri is the only incentive to continue to the end of the film. I have no idea why this movie is Rater R. The Cable Guide referred to this as a Comedy, Romance and Horror flick. It wasn't funny or scary to watch.

This could easily be a sci-fi channel pilot as it has all the earmarks of a Hallmark presentation with a little blood thrown in so they can call it sci-fi.

The plot is hokey, the execution is so-so, and there is no redeeming social value.

The only reason most people purchase this movie is that it contains Shiri Appleby as Lilith / Elle; she has indeed come a way since her original Taco Bell commercial days. However, one person does not make a movie.

The plotline is a distortion of myth with a little sci-fi tossed in to create a winged creature with a cute smile that shall protect humanity from evil creatures with snarly smiles.

This movie passes time for people that do not have anything better to do.

If you don't have a sense of where you're going when you put together a movie, anybody more mature than the average twelve year old is going to know it. I think that's what's wrong with 'Darklight'. Watching it, I had the unshakable impression that the actors were making up lines and situations as they went along, while the plot seemed not so much to unravel as it did fray; to sputter, rather than flow.

The special effects weren't all that hot, either. Aren't we supposed to be in the age of highly-developed CGI technology, where the creation of, say, a realistic demon (if that's not an oxymoron) on-screen almost requires nothing more outré than a software suite from Circuit City? Where nowadays what is needed most to be convincing is an actual vision, not just a vague, cartoonish idea?

And it's too bad; it's an interesting idea: Lilith, Adam's first wife, lives today, but with artificially-induced amnesia. While 'somewhat evil' herself, she is nevertheless 'kept in reserve', so to speak, by one of those secret-brotherhoods-that-last-for-millennia which has served occult fiction so well over the years, and is brought back to fight a greater evil.

At least, that's what I think is going on, but after a half-hour or so, I found myself not really caring. Even some good creepy atmosphere was not enough to save this latest 'bad babe' fantasy--particularly when the babe in question, seemingly meant to be one of those 'damaged waifs' so popular in modern fiction, comes across instead as rather mentally challenged.

If it's a cold, rainy night, and you're all sitting around, feeling a need to have some background while you play Yahtze, give it a watch. Otherwise, check out the Weather Channel.