Sunday, October 23, 2011

October Horror 2011: Day 23 - And Soon the darkness


And Soon the Darkness, released in 2010 is a remake of a 1970 British film also called And Soon the Darkness.  It is set in Argentina and features Karl Urban, Odette Yustman, and Amber Heard.

Amber Heard is one of the current crop of scream queens making some fair decent movies.  All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is actually one of my favorite under-appreciated slasher movies.

Odette Yustman is also pretty strong in both horror and mainstream.  She's even got a recurring role in the current season of House.  It doesn't hurt that she looks like Meghan Fox if Meghan Fox had acting talent.

And Soon the Darkness is the story of two American girls who are on vacation together in Argentina.  They separate from a bike tour and tool around the country.  We join them on their last night in the country where they stay in a hotel but go out and get shithoused at a bar.  Odette's character, Ellie, spends a lot of it making out with a guy while Amber's Stephanie obviously doesn't approve.  The guy ends up following them back to their hotel and being creepy, they're saved by Karl Urban.  They're so drunk they don't get up early enough and miss their bus back to the airport.  Instead of trying to make other travel arrangements they decide to tour the country some more and visit some waterfalls.  They have a fight and get separated, Ellie gets kidnapped.  Steph and Karl Urban try to rescue her, there's death, some twists, more death, angsty, etc.  Eventually Stephanie gets free and is rescued by Argentinian military.

I glossed over a lot of details in the name of avoiding spoiling anything, and also because I just don't want to go into it.

The movie is unfortunately dull, despite its best attempts at action sequences and throwing around twists so as not be accused of being formula.  The earlier action sequences suffer from none of the characters acting intelligently, and the twists are predictable...which kindof defeats the point of twists.

The characters don't really help since our protagonist, Steph, is really a one note that waffles around most of the first act before being defined completely by her attachment to Ellie.  Ellie is a stereotype of the annoying party-girl with a deep friendship with a more innocent girl, and that just really made me dislike her.  The entire character just grated on me and I spent a lot of the movie lamenting her time on screen.  Steph isn't much more interesting, but she is at least not annoying.  She suffers from being too afraid to act appropriately.  Even when she starts to go final-girl, she only survives by pure luck and not any sort of transformative badassery.

Karl Urban is actually the best to watch because even though he's also a one-note, the performance manages to tone down that aspect enough to give the impression he might be a fully realized person.

The movie does one kindof interesting, artsy thing.  While starting off in full color, as the movie goes along they desaturate the colors and increase the contrast.  It's a cool little thing to read some subtext into, but the rest of the movie is just dull.  The plot was very similar to other kidnap/revenge stories like Hostel or Taken, with only very few variations from formula.

Not really worth the effort.

With The Americas complete, we venture to Europe with: The Shrine

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