if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

I saw this film for the first time in nearly forty years recently and was surprised at how well it stood up. When I saw it as a teenager I had thought the ending a bit corny but that the first 90 minutes up to the revelation as to identity of the killer were as tense as almost any film I had seen up to that point of my life that was not called Psycho. I have seen several tenser films since that night long ago but the ending was better than I gave it credit for too.The plot is simple enough. Two young English girls are on a biking holiday round France and they have different agenda for their trip. One, Kathy, is blonde and there for a party and to meet blokes whilst the other, Jane, is more sensible and apparently intent on doing a mileage similar to that of a rider in the Tour De France. Kathy takes a fancy to a suave young man, Paul, in a café and when Paul follows the girls on his Lambretta and the girls stop for a sunbathe Kathy falls out with Jane at least partly we suspect because she hopes Paul will double back to meet her. Jane goes on for a while then returns to her friend and discovers that she has disappeared. Paul arrives on the scene, conveniently, and tells her that he is a detective. Gradually Jane comes to disbelieve him and flees to the office of the local gendarme. Paul tracks her down and she escapes his desperate, threatening attempts to speak to her. She finds Cathy's dead body, bashes Paul on the head and rushes into the arms of the gendarme and then realises that he, not Paul, is the killer. The film ends with two more girls on bikes cycling through a rain storm whilst a police car heads towards the crime scene.The film looks great, the scenes of these two attractive young women cycling through the sunlit corn fields are idyllic and the growing menace is very well done. We know something has happened but not quite what. The locals seem an increasingly bizarre lot partly because the lack of subtitles makes us identify with an increasingly anxious Jane as we have no idea if they are hostile or not. And that damn Paul keeps turning up when he shouldn't.As I watched the film again I was reminded of the later Franco-Dutch classic Spoorloos ( The Vanishing) whilst the discovery of Cathy's body is like Jamie Lee Curtis in the wardrobe near the end of the original Halloween. And Soon The Darkness lacks the psychological insights of The Vanishing and is not as genuinely scary as Carpenter's slasher masterpiece but it is well done. Paul is played by Sandor Eles who was for many of us best remembered as Mr Paul the Maitre'D in the chronically bad soap Crossroads but he is fine here and John Nettleton as the gendarme is convincing and a million miles from his affable gossipy mate of Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. The two girls are good too. Michelle Dotrice as Kathy is best remembered as Frank Spencer's wife Betty but she looks good and is credible as the slightly sillier girl whilst Pamela Franklin is terrific as she gets more and more scared.You never stop wanting her to find her friend and when she is saved at the end I breathed a sigh of relief. And Soon The Darkness is not a great film though it certainly deserves a better reputation with critics for the 'guides' who seem to have based their sniffy reviews on the synopsis and the knowledge that the director, Robert Fuest, and writers, Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, had extensive backgrounds in pot boiler British television of the sixties and seventies. Not great but worth catching.

An uneven but enjoyable movie. Cathy and Jane are 2 English girls on a cycling trip in France. Early on in the piece the girls argue, Cathy stops to lap up the sun, Jane proceeds. Whoops, This is the first half hour which was referenced in another review. A difficult introduction made all the more difficult by the camera work which featured close ups and lingering shots which were meaningless. Or were they? The rest of the film finds Jane turning back and searching for her friend. Drawing the obvious conclusions (we already have a good idea) she meets a number of characters and one of the strengths of the film is the ability to subtly accuse everyone. There is no blatant, ham fisted laying of clues but all characters are given just enough to get you thinking.There is one moment in the film which had me jumping out of my chair and that doesn't happen often. I could have done with some subtitles for the French dialogue but maybe we are expected to hear what Jane would hear. I had very little idea of what the characters are saying (schoolboy French) and therefore may miss out on important details. As may Jane. We have to remember that Jane has not seen what we have seen so she can only assume the worst.The conclusion is a little lame and not unexpected. And a few of the markers laid down by the directors are left hanging which is frustrating and leads to an uneven film. Oh yeah, and the music at the end is completely inappropriate.

This is an eerie little 70's movie, where 2 nurses go on a cycling holiday in France, then cross paths with a strange man, then one of the girls disappear and it's up to the other one to try and find her and finding herself alone and isolated.The scenario is quite frightening where the young girl is all alone in a strange country, and that carefully builds up the atmosphere and where she learns about the local disappearances. All this takes place in the daytime which is rather different as many movies uses the nighttime to create scares and chills. Even the wooded area is very chilling when one of the girls is all alone, you straight away have the feeling that she's being watched and the fact that it doesn't show a glimpse of anyone is in fact like being trapped in a nightmare.But the pacing is rather slow and very talky and the fact that you don't know what any of the villagers are saying does get annoying. I do understand why they did it, too put the viewer in the girl's shoes, but even when she's not in the scene and just them, you still don't know what's going on. But the mystery aspect of this movie is very well crafted with several red herrings and suspects are well handled. and the scenes when she has a run in with the stranger does keep you guessing and guessing until the final climax, which wasn't entirely that satisfying and I kinda guessed the outcome of the friend.The performances were very brilliantly cast, both the young female leads Michele Dotrice and Pamela Franklin were both spot on and Sandor Eles was perfectly convincing as the mysterious stranger.All in all a very good mystery thriller, but don't go expecting anything that thrilling though as it's rather slowly paced, but had great atmoshere and tension.

And Soon the Darkness turns on a now common premise. Two young girls go out on back roads to seek the real France, only to find true danger on an isolated landscape.The film is somewhat unique in its ability to capture terror in broad daylight in a not wholly vacant surrounding. The two girls seemingly have nothing to worry about as they bike along the open roads to their next destination. The set up, though somewhat overdone in present day (and therefore mildly less powerful then it would have been in its time), creates a fairly solid foundation for a truly suspenseful ride. However, once one of the girls goes missing, the realism of the story gets thrown to the wind and some of its primary fear elements turn to frustrations hurled at the television set.While the acting is generally good, there are moments when it seems that Jane (Pamela Franklin) has completely forgotten that her friend has gone missing in the same area where another girl had been murdered not so long ago...that she is in a different country where she doesn't speak the language or know anyone...that the one man she had been confiding in now appears to be a killer. Not only that, but Jane is a reflection of an earlier model of horror victim. On the cusp of "girl power" films, Jane's only defense for the majority of the picture is to run and hide. Most notably, when Jane is in the house where Paul is breaking in, she doesn't search for a weapon. She knows where he is coming in. She has the advantage, but instead she runs on. It's an image that is somewhat hard to accept when seeing it for the first time in modern day.The true faults of the film, though, are in the actions of Paul (Sandor Eles) which never go explained. Why is her always hiding? Why does he constantly leave Jane in the dark? While I'm a fan of filling in the blanks with films, this one seems more like lackluster writing efforts than intentional mystery. For one thing, Paul must be the worst detective of all time. He destroys evidence that may have aided in bringing a killer to justice. He withholds information that could have protected Jane. He is terrible at searching trailers...how many hiding places could there really be (come on, you checked there in the last one). He doesn't see a pair of white panties on a dark ground during the day, but thinks to check under cars for missing bicycles...I find it very hard to find a film scary when the characters seems so utterly incompetent. The film does a good job of building suspense, but then you start to really not care if anyone makes it out alive. There are many others that do the same job while creating logical plot leaps, character development, and fulfilling endings. This film is not the full package.