In the Dark

If you like lousy movies - and I mean real stinkers - then this is the flick for you. Yep, this film has it all - putrid directing, actors who wouldn't make the cut for a high school class play, inane writing, ridiculously inept special effects, and on and on. If these people were trying to make a terrible film, they exceeded beyond their wildest dreams.

As Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur showed nearly 80 years ago, it's possible to make a great horror film with no special effects and virtually no budget. All the filmmaker has to do is find some reasonably creative way to imply what's lurking just outside the frame, and let the viewer's imagination take it from there. It is plain, however, that the geniuses behind this masterpiece never even heard of Lewton or Tourneur.

It's not surprising that the director of this mess - Mr. Marc Cinquanta - chose not to put his own name in the credits. However, the name he selected - "Slater Kane" - sounds like he was trying to channel a 1970s peep show producer. A person who can't even think up a decent stage name shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a camera, as this disaster of a film shows.

I also have to note that while most of the reviews for this movie are justifiably negative, a few try to make it sound like some great creative accomplishment. Having seen the film, I have no choice but to conclude that the director either asked his friends to write the reviews or posted them himself under phony names. Didn't doing that embarrass you, Marc?

The plot is original and the camera shots are amazing. I'm still not sure if it is all real footage like the director says it is in the beginning of the film. If this is actual footage then it is pretty amazing stuff. I heard that at least some of the film is the actual footage from the real events. Either way, it is awesome. Each scene is dream-like and disturbing at the same time. The way the film is edited is wild. My favorite scenes in the film are the scenes in the crazy house and the silent scenes with the surveillance cameras! CREEPY! Plus, the rock-n-roll music rocks. This is one of my favorite horror films now. It will be a cult classic, no doubt. Trippy film! Loved it.

So why am I give it four stars?

Because there is a scene towards the end with a rotating security camera that is absolutely brilliant. There's no dialogue, and because the camera keeps turning away from the action, you can't see everything that happens. But what you can see is enough. I would watch a whole movie like that.

Shameless asrtoturfing in the comments section, obvious in the first quarter of the film, warranted an IMDb registration. Don't fall for it, 'In The Dark' is one of the most sloppily conceived, hackneyed and unintentionally incoherent films in a long while.

A group of wild teens break into an abandoned asylum on Halloween night to drink and get high and, their story told by the portable cameras left behind, come face to face with a 'presence' seeking revenge. In a vain attempt to relieve that mind numbing string of clichés the screenwriters employ an admittedly novel device, augmenting the shaky cams with scenes from the facility's security cameras. It's unconvincing and forced. All but one camera are so painfully and clearly positioned for the film instead of surveillance the main effect is annoyance. The characters never behave like people, befalling fates through a staggering display of stupidity and complete lack of sense for self preservation. Aware of a threat watching them from an asylum window as they party outside, the reaction is to run into the asylum. When one of them becomes too overwhelmed to cope, in this film's logic the thing to do is put her to bed in an isolated, unlocked and unguarded room away from the rest where she'll 'be safe'. Not that the viewer is given much reason to care. An all-purpose stream of overlapped yells too often substitutes for dialog - in this scene for fright, that one excess, the next one anger. Horror nor gore approaches that of Robocop 2 and the effects are... missing. The protagonists run around all film in freshly laundered pajamas grimacing.

It's not hard to find zero-budget independent horror films that deliver. This isn't one of them.

You would think it would be easy to make a move set in an insane asylum scary, but for some reason movie makers have had trouble with this. Dark Asylum was horrible, Session 9 was pretty good, and this movie is somewhere in the middle.

This movie borrows very heavily from Blair Witch, but that doesn't automatically make it bad. It's a legitimate way to make a scary movie on a low budget, and budgets don't get much lower than this.

I don't have a problem with the acting; the problem is most of the characters are very generic, and some of the writing is awful ("You're not my friend anymore!"). Also this movie is set in the 80's for some inexplicable reason which makes it all the more cheesy.

Just forget about the plot... it doesn't make any sense, the "twist" ending is rendered completely ineffective by the inability of the writers to make us give a crap about what's going on.

The main thing that this movie does well is provide some creepy shots. Again, they use the Blair Witch idea of home movie cameras and throws in security camera footage to pretty good effect.

This would be a decent student movie, but if you're expecting the competence that normally comes with "real" movie you will be disappointed.