Absolutely Fantastic

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

The Three Acts:The initial tableaux: The very beginning of the film is consists of archival footage of logging backed up with atonal, jump-out-of-your-skin music. Trees are ripped apart, with chunks of them turned to chips by automatic machinery. Tree trunks are dumped skinned (figuratively speaking) of their bark, separated from limbs and roots, on the ground for future pickup.Next we switch to a staged logging site with modern photography, no current tree destruction, and next to no sound. The site is closing down for the weekend; a winter storm is coming in. The foreman checks up on the last crew still on the (moderately) secure and closed site. This does not go well. The early splatter set my expectations going in the wrong direction for a moment. This is more of a suspenseful film.Delineation of conflicts: Near the town of Tanner, the logging company cuts down trees to produce lumber to sell. Creatures in that wooded area are forced to move to find a new habitat. In Maiden Woods, to the south of Tanner, the local animal owners would like their animals to be safe, while the new creatures in the woods are hungry. Hunters would like to shoot deer as usual, and wonder about the migration of animals.The local Sheriff, Paul Shields, his wife Susan, and their remaining son Adam are separated after the death of their other son, Tim. Everyone in town wants the sheriff to heal from this, but he is wallowing in it. Various religious themes are batted about with little consensus. Is the creature the devil, or some animal thought extinct? Does the Sheriff need to reconnect to the deity, or is he just lost in sorrow? Was the deputy from New York City 'meant' to have moved to the film's small town, or was this just a single workaholic man drifting through life?While dealing with his emotional issues, Paul has to help out the town, the horse owners, the hunters, and the Sheriff's department by figuring out what's going on.Resolution: The Sheriff, Deputy Saunders, the forest rangers, and local hunters get closer to understanding the threat to Maiden Woods. Is there a workable solution?

A creature is terrorizing the small town of Maiden Woods. Animals are coming up missing, strange footprints and claw marks are everywhere. The town is unnerved and it's up to one stoic sheriff to keep everyone calm.The movie is more of a drama with a horror story as the occasional distraction. What did that mean? It meant witnessing Sheriff Paul (Kevin Durand) deal with the loss of his son and the painful conversations he would have with his estranged wife--then a blur of a creature. In essence they were able to maintain the mysterious and ominous entity that was upsetting the town because it was almost secondary to Paul and his issues.One could say it made the movie better and one could say it made it worse. For those looking for a scary drama, they got what they wanted. For those looking for a horror with little to no drama, they were somewhat disappointed. I, for one, was looking for a pure, unadulterated scary movie. The drama detracted from that, but because it was done well and they didn't make it too sappy and over-the-top I was able to satisfyingly watch it.

To be perfectly blunt I nearly turned the movie off a couple of minutes in. Normally there is a person who works on a film called a colorist and that person is in charge of how the film looks in regard to color. Whoever colored this film basically just hit the "blue" button and called it a day. Seriously, it's the worst coloring job I've seen on any film not shot by complete amateurs. That's a major gripe, but once you get past it there's more to this film.The nice slow/deliberate pace is a welcome change of pace from most movies now that have to slam you with action from scene 1. This film did a fantastic job of reminding me of stories of the Jersey Devil that I read when I was younger. It did what I feel that most horror movies should do and often can't pull off, it gave me the creeps. Creepy wins out over quick/cheap scares any day in my book. It also won out wonderfully on another level. They don't really show what they're up against until the end of the film. Good creepy monsters should not be fully seen until the end of the film. That said, I wasn't terribly impressed with the creature effects when they finally did show it...but having given me nearly and hour and a half of creeps prior to that point I'll say the creature effects only slightly affect how I feel about the film.Overall a good creature feature that could have been a great creature feature with the use of puppetry instead of CGI, better color grading, and maybe a runtime that was slightly longer so as to allow the film to explore more "strange happenings" around the small town.VERDICT: Definitely worth a watch. You may not rewatch it much, but it's a great film first-time through.

Wow, this film made me want to kick someone ... mainly whatever douche in a suit insisted on a) showing the monster at the end and then b) tacking a cheap "teaser" ending onto the whole thing, just in case you had missed the fact that you had just been insulted with bad CGI.As other reviewers have pointed out, this film LOOKS great. The cinematography is top-notch and the limited color palette underscores both the creepiness of the story, and the emotional troubles of the main characters. The performances are surprisingly heart-felt and subtle for a "horror movie," especially that of Kevin Durand, who sometimes comes off like Christopher Walken's sensitive (and less drop-dead weird) younger brother.Finally, I must say that the Wendigo legend is a favorite of mine, especially via Algernon Blackwood's clunky but creepy-as-hell short story.... and up until the end, Dark Was the Night is a GREAT telling of the Wendigo tale. The early not-even-glimpses of the creature are unsettling. The film has pretty much everything going for it, and then ...... in the climactic battle at the end, we see the monster, dead on. And it is lousy. I reeled from its CGI crumminess. I think I may have gasped. I felt ripped off, fooled, violated and insulted. But that producer in a suit (see above) wasn't done with me yet. The very last thing HAD to be the equivalent of the giant quivering "?" at the end of so many B movies in the 50s. And all that subtlety is flushed straight down the crapper for the sake of a cheap shot.I'd love to talk to the director and find out what happened. Given the quality of the bulk of this film, the ending CANNOT have been his idea.