From the Dark 2014!
From the Dark 2014
So I watched From the Dark last night. Just the cover alone looked so good. I was sold, hadn’t even watched a preview for it. Just saw the cover, read the description and I was sold! Sadly, that’s where the excitement for this bad horror movie ends.
According to the description this horror movie is about a monster that chases some kids, only at night. Great, I love monster movies, even most of the bad ones. But, this film makes it hard to like because it starts with characters doing stupid things and it never stops. Seriously, from the beginning when an old farmer discovers some kind of body buried in his field and decides to dig the rest of it up instead of going to call the police. Seriously?!
However, he doesn’t just start digging it up, he now needs a flashlight, it’s getting dark. So this dumbass old man leaves to go get a light. Of course upon his return to the site a few moments later, it’s obvious the body is gone by the huge hole in the ground. The dummy looks around, instead of making the right decision to get the hell out of there. Stupid!
Then we meet our protagonists. A young couple on a drive to some weekend getaway. The male is a pretty much a douchebag from the start. Stephen Cromwell plays Mark a young guy that is awkwardly talking about not wanting to get married ever; to his girlfriend. It just seemed a bit too much, like maybe he really did want to get married. It was overwhelmingly obvious he had an agenda but I will get back to that in a bit.
So Mark is pretty much a duchebag. He makes the transition from duchebag to dumbass, seamlessly. Their car gets stuck in the mud because he’s not bright enough to have turned the car around when he has the chance. Idiot! Then he decides to leave his beautiful girlfriend Sarah, played by Niamh Algar, alone with the car. Horror movie rule #2 never split up. Idiot!
It’s like someone once told this character, “You can’t be this stupid?!” and he took at as a personal challenge to prove them wrong.
But, he isn’t done being a dumbass, not by a long shot. This kid is taking being a dumbass in horror movies to a whole new level. It’s like someone once told this character, “You can’t be this stupid?!” and he took at as a personal challenge to prove them wrong. It’s one painful act of stupidity after another with this guy.
It didn’t take long before I started to root for the creature. And, let’s go ahead and stop calling it a creature, it was just an ugly vampire. Only attacks at night, had a stake in it, any light source hurts it. Let’s just call it what it is. I wanted this vampire to kill him from just moments after being introduced to his character. There have been bigger douchebags in horror movies, I am not saying this character is king of the douchebags. I am just saying that this kid is supposed to be one of the protagonists and I pretty much couldn’t stand him from the first time he opened his mouth. Then he turns into a raging idiot and I was done. I almost stopped watching the movie because he was so stupid. The only reason I didn’t was in the hopes that he dies painfully. Nope!
Now let’s move on to Sarah, the girlfriend. I liked her from the start. She was smart, obviously made a bad decision in choosing to date this guy but if I held that against every single woman that dated a douchebag… Well, let’s just say we all have at least that one mistake.
Sarah was smart and then all of sudden she goes full retard and “You never go full retard.” Here’s some examples of her sudden mass of stupidity. In one scene she and her boyfriend are safe for the moment, they have a light and a have a good visual of their surroundings. They can easily just sit there and wait for dawn. But no, evidently Mark’s stupidity has infected her because she decides it would be a great idea to make an escape attempt on a tractor she sees through the upstairs window. This is her genius plan. Doesn’t know if the tractor works or not. Even if it does, it’s a pretty good guess the vampire could still kill them while they’re in it. So, she’s leaves Mark with the light, he’s barley conscious enough to shine it on her while she’s outside making her way to the tractor. She was as safe as she was going to get where she was and for some stupid reason she decides to split from Mark and make a run for tractor that may or may not even work. Dumbass!
Probably the stupidest thing she does next to her decision to date such an idiot comes shortly after the incident above. She narrowly makes it back the house and then is attacked by her idiot boyfriend who is slowly changing into a vampire. She begins to feel sorry for him after knocking him out. Remember that part I said early about it being obvious the idiot had some kind of plans because him talking about not wanting to ever get married seemed like an obvious set up? It was, he planned to propose to Sarah. We learn this when the engagement ring falls out of his pocket while he’s unconscious. Seeing it, she now decides to lock herself in the bathroom with him. Seriously, there are now two vampires wanting her dead. The first vamp and now her boyfriend but she only locks one of them out? It was just so stupid. The things that happen in this movie are just an assault on your intelligence.
…stupidity is like a disease and no one can survive being surrounded by it for long periods of time without becoming infected.
Let that be a lesson to men and women. Never date stupid people. I don’t care how much you love them or how sweet they are, stupidity is like a disease and no one can survive being surrounded by it for long periods of time without becoming infected.
Now, this review isn’t all negative. There are several good things about the From the Dark. The acting is pretty good. There was never a doubt in mind that Mark and Sarah weren’t complete idiots. They made me believe these two people really were just that damn stupid. A lot of times in horror movies you are faced with really stupid characters and it’s made worse by marginal acting or flat out horrible acting. This wasn’t the case here. Both actors I thought did really good jobs. It was the writing that just made this movie so hard to watch.
Also, the special effects, the ones they showed were pretty good. There wasn’t a lot of them and it would have been nice to more but what they did show was done well. There was an injury to a characters leg that looked pretty well done. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh! That’s gotta hurt!” That’s a good response because as someone who had dabbled a little bit with special effects make-up, crappy effects take me right out of the movie. You never want to lose your audience. My only complaint about the special effects was simply that there were not enough of them.
The direction was competent, not great. So many shots I felt could have been done better. Shots that distanced you from the action or emotional content instead of bringing you in closer. It’s another horror movie that could have been really good but instead it was ruined by stupid character syndrome. It’s bad enough in horror movies when you have stupid characters whose only purpose is to obviously add to the body count. But, when your only two main character are complete idiots the movie is going to fail.
I give this movie a rating of 2 out 5 stars.
Cast of Characters:
Niamh Algar … Sarah
Stephen Cromwell … Mark
Ged Murray
Gerry O’Brien