Reign in Darkness



Last week I got together with some friends and we watched a movie. For some reason these friends, Bryan and Chasity, are a bit wary of my movie choices. Okay, maybe I’ve shown Bryan a couple movies so bad that they reduced him to tears, but it would be petty to hold that against me. In any case we watched a movie that they owned. The movie, Reign in Darkness (2001) was apparently a gift from Chasity’s mother, who may have thought, judging from the DVD cover art, that it was sequel to Underworld (2003). Why Chasity’s mother would be gifting her with alleged sequels to a bad vampire action movie is not really clear to me.



The point I’m trying to make here (and I can’t stress this enough) is that this was not my movie.

The first scene in Reign in Darkness is a long helicopter shot into a city. This is accompanied by narration from the main character, who identifies himself as “Michael Dorn” – like the Star Trek actor. Michael delivers a lot of very convoluted back story about how he was a scientist working on a cure for HIV and now he’s not and how he’s mad at “them.” When he’s done the scene shifts to a badly processed day for night shot of a woman being chased through a park by a handheld camera. The movie then flashbacks (I think -- it’s never made clear what order these events are happening in) to Michael as a scientist working on cure to HIV in a lab. Michael invents a drug called K-17, which his mysterious bosses want to test on homeless people. For some reason Michael goes along with the thug named Gage who is injecting the drug into the victims. Michael accidently gets a jab, turning him into a vampire. He shoots Gage in the leg to escape, and spends the rest of the movie wearing leather and running from Gage.

When Michael starts narrating there is something strangely mush-mouthed about his delivery, like he has a speech impediment. It wasn't until the first scene in the lab we figured out what was going on. This movie is Australian, but everyone is trying to put on American accents. Very, very bad American accents. The invaluable directors' commentary on the DVD reveals that they did this because the audience for one of the directors' previous shorts complained that the short lost credibility as science fiction when people talked like Australians. Apparently characters have more credibility when they speak like idiots.

There will probably be a full Stomp Tokyo review of Reign in Darkness later on. For right now I'll just say what makes this movie so excruciating to watch is that the filmmakers didn't have either the talent or the money to make the movie they conceived. This movie uses narration to move the plot, and the action scenes are often little more than people posing a lot but doing little. The climax of the film is some six minutes of soliloquy by a character we haven't seen before explaining what's been going on. Painful, just painful.

The showing of this movie went over so badly, Bryan and Chasity insisted I leave with the DVD. I guess it is my movie after all.

Posted: Mon - December 27, 2004 at      

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