Today's Feature: Dark Was The Night (2014)
We've got a couple of big-time fancy pants actors in today's movie. A couple of real A-listers. Frankly, I don't know how the producers of Dark Was The Night could even afford the likes of Kevin Durand and Lukas Haas considering the amount of money they clearly spent on the computer generated monsters that dominate the film's third act. I think that was a spoiler, by the way. Wait, wait... I know it was a spoiler. But it's no big deal. Either you've already seen a movie like Dark Was The Night, or you've seen a movie like Dark Was The Night, which means you've seen Dark Was The Night.
That's not exactly a knock against the movie, so don't assume Dark Was The Night is terrible. It isn't. It just doesn't tread any new ground with its story or execution. Really, the only halfway original aspect of the movie at all is the title: Dark Was The Night. That's not too bad, is it? The title sounds more suited to an old-fashioned noir thriller than a B-grade monster movie, however. I suppose there are plenty of night sequences in the film, and it gets pretty dark from time to time, but come on. Dark Was The Night? Why, that's downright ponderous. How many times am I going to type the title Dark Was The Night before I'm finished writing this blog post? Let's find out.
So Dark Was The Night follows a small town sheriff (Kevin Durand) and his recently hired deputy (Lukas Haas), a transplant from New York City who was looking for a break from shooting all the CHUDs in the sewers and wanted to get away from all his worries. So he moved out to Maiden Woods, a lovely little burg with a slight monster problem in the surrounding woods. The sheriff cries a lot because one of his sons died in a tragic pumpkin carving accident, and he's estranged from his dear wife, who moved out and found religion in an effort to come to terms with little Timmy's death. The sheriff's other son, whose name is probably Timmy, Jr, is still alive, but nobody ever pays attention to him because he's distressingly precocious.
A little further north of town, a logging company is busy raping the world's natural wonders, and they inadvertently stumble upon some... thing... lurking in the deep woods. Something that has kept to itself for a very long time, but after wiping out the itinerant lumberjacks and feasting on their flesh, it leaves its cozy home in the trees and its simple life of devouring the odd deer or raccoon, and heads due south to the veritable smorgasbord of tasty human treats that is Maiden Woods, which is conveniently cut off from the outside world by a massive winter storm. Fish in a barrel, man. Fish in a barrel.
That's really all there is to the movie. Sure, there's some gobbledygook about ancient native spirits and even a casual namedrop of the wendigo legend via a convenient search on everyone's favorite search engine (Search Engine), but it all amounts to nothing, because the monsters in Dark Was The Night aren't supernatural in origin, presented as a remnant population of some undiscovered ancient predatory species. In the end, the beleaguered townsfolk gather in the church to make their last stand against the insidious monster, and the crying sheriff stabs it several hundred times and it dies. The big, ridiculous-looking 'roided-out lizard monster gets stabbed to death like some kind of chump during the film's climax and it's all very adequate.
Then everybody gathers round the shoddily rendered corpse and breathes a sigh of relief as its revealed that the church's exterior is literally crawling with the dead monster's family members as they prepare to make a feast out of the soft, fleshy little people within. What a twist, eh? That's Dark Was The Night, and it was just fine. Yes, I said it was fine. It's a fine little creature feature, and they really don't make a lot of movies like this anymore.
Once upon a time, audiences used to be treated to a pretty regular succession of well-made, well-acted monster movies, and they would actually sit in darkened theaters and enjoy these movies together. I know this all sounds very alien to you in our modern world of endlessly winking "so bad it's good" trash like the never-ending parade of Sharknado movies and their ilk on such luminary cable networks as SyFy, but monster movies weren't always groan-inducing garbage constantly reminding you that the filmmakers are in on the joke and that laughter is the only appropriate response to any motion picture that features a non-human antagonist.
People used to take pride in making these movies. They would take their creations seriously. A little levity was always a-ok, but it wasn't a crime to create genuine suspense and thrills, and the creatures that populated these movies weren't treated like objects of pure derision. The actors weren't phoning in their performances just to collect an easy paycheck, and the folks behind the camera were never just going through the motions because they thought that if they threw in enough bogus pop culture reference their little cookie cutter crapfests might generate a trending hashtag on Twitter.
But that was a long time ago, my children, and I'm afraid those days of solid theatrical creature features are well behind us. Those glory days of monster cinema died shortly after the 1988 release of creature creator Stan Winston's directorial debut, the minor masterpiece Pumpkinhead. Now that's a film definitely worth talking about. It's direct-to-video sequel Pumpkinhead 2: Bloodwings, not so much. And never mention that pair of direct-to-television "sequels" featuring the ghost of Lance Henriksen's character from the original film in my presence, unless you fancy watching a grown man lapse into a crying jag as he relives the truly horrifying experience of watching these films like a PTSD-stricken soldier remembering his own harrowing brush with death.
My point being, decent monster movies are such a rarity in this day and age that they practically don't even exist. They're a cryptozoological oddity, like sasquatch or the chupacabra. I'm not saying Dark Was The Night is a return to form for the creature feature, because it doesn't quite cross that line into monstrous infamy, mostly due to the design and rendering of the monsters as revealed during the third act, but it gets pretty damned close. It looks and feels like an actual movie, for starters. Nobody would ever watch Dark Was The Night and confuse it for some cheap, fast and dirty SyFy original movie.
The direction and cinematography create a slowly building sense of dread as the narrative unfolds, beginning with strange hoofprints found throughout town, then missing livestock are reported and mass migrations of birds are spotted, signalling some serious upheaval in the natural order surrounding Maiden Woods, before a destructive snowstorm hits and the monsters brazenly come out in the open, hunting their hapless prey in the chaos, cornering the survivors in the town church as they prepare to fight for their lives, because if they can just hold out until dawn, heavily armed reinforcements will arrive from out of town to secure the situation and stop the voracious predators. If they can just hold out until dawn...
Dark Was The Night is a good movie and well worth your time as a viewer. Kevin Durand and Lukas Haas turn in excellent performances as the two leads, a pair of small-time cops who find themselves in a scenario for which they are woefully unprepared, trying only to save as many lives as they can when they realize the severity of their situation. Durand in particular evokes some serious pathos in his role as a good man hanging on for dear life in a world without rhyme or reason as he deals with the tragic loss of his young son, forced to protect his remaining family in a primal struggle against an unknowable terror.
The only real stumbling block in this movie is the monsters themselves, which, once fully revealed, are too goofy to be taken seriously. The decision to present the main creature in full view, lingering on its ropey anatomy for far too long during the film's climax, was a huge mistake. The creature worked as a background menace, something sinister lurking in the margins of the frame, always in the shadows or out of focus. The creature design just wasn't good enough to put on display in such an obvious way. It's a shame, because the monster itself is really the only blemish on an otherwise well-made creature feature.
I still recommend Dark Was The Night, however. It's not a bad way to spend an hour and forty minutes, especially if, like me, you're an old school creature feature guy or gal. Give it a shot. You probably won't regret it.
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