Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

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.

Two British girls vacationing in rural France find themselves at the mercy of a sex maniac. This somewhat arty and slow-burning suspenser on THE LADY VANISHES lines was production designer-turned-director Fuest's third directorial effort and his entrée into the genre in which he specialized for the rest of his relatively short but stylish film career. Co-written by Brian Clemens (the creator of TV's THE AVENGERS – on which series Fuest served in both capacities) and Terry Nation (the creator of TV's DOCTOR WHO), the film hardly proves as fanciful as such credentials would suggest; in fact, it is agreeably streamlined and reasonably well sustained by an eerie atmosphere, glossy visuals and Laurie Johnson's evocative score. Although somewhat undercast as befits its low-key setting, the film is peopled by vivid characters: from increasingly distressed star Pamela Franklin to ambiguous helper/stalker Sandor Eles and from stranded British schoolmistress Clare Kelly to wide-eyed gendarme John Nettleton. Disappointingly, when the climactic confrontation eventually comes about towards the very end, the surprising villain is disposed of very quickly with just one blow to the head! The film was unnecessarily and inauspiciously remade in 2010 – which version is available to view in its entirety on "You Tube" – but I have not bothered with it myself.

In the early 70's I spent a day with my friend cycling on a lonely country road somewhere in Hungary. Then, in the evening, we saw this movie in a village movie theatre with only a couple of viewers. It was frightening, and after the movie we had to cycle home on the country road.Other: nice to see Sándor Éles ( this is the original spelling ), the Hungarian born actor in the movie.The hole film has a special atmosphere with a sharp contrast between the sunny countryside and the dark events. Interesting scene when the old man ( the policeman's father ) says that it's going to rain. In the final scene it really starts raining.One of the best suspense movies. Recommended.

2 girls go on a cycling holiday to France. When one of them goes missing, it's up to the other one to try to find out what is going on and try to save her friend.The set up of this was pretty slow but it built up the atmosphere and tension really well. It is set in the French countryside and the sunshine is relentless, which was a nice change from horror movies being shot in a lot of darkness. A lot of the time people are speaking French and the protagonist doesn't understand the language, as there are no subtitles the audience doesn't either, which I thought was clever. While the ending was not unexpected, the amount of suspects did keep me guessing for a while and the film kept the tension building the whole way through. Pamela Franklin did a good job carrying the film mostly on her shoulders, and overall I think it was a very good, tense little thriller. It wasn't particularly scary, so don't see it if you're wanting a good fright, but as a thriller it was pretty good.