Brilliant and touching

A Brilliant Conflict

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Okay, before I start my review, I would like to make something unmistakably clear, DO NOT BELIEVE ANYONE WHO SAYS THAT THIS MOVIE IS AS GORY OR GORIER THAN DEAD ALIVE AKA BRAINDEAD!!! The amount of gore in this movie was highly disappointing, save for one long vampire melting sequence near the end, there are some stabbings, some bitings, a lot of off-screen stuff, maybe two or three actual on screen deaths. There was actually so little gore in the movie that I stopped thinking of this movie as a gore film and started looking at it as an '80s style B-horror movie, and it actually was entertaining in that aspect. Nevertheless, there are still several other little things in this movie to bug you and/or get on your nerves. Including but not limited to:The vampires... or zombies... or both,... Yah, I'm not really sure what they were.In the first part of the movie, the film constantly cuts from "19 minutes to sunset" to "2 minutes to sunrise" to "23 minutes to sunset" and so on and so on and so on. It does this a LOT, sometimes with nothing happening in between.Cut to two minutes before sunset, guy sits in his car, cut to twenty minutes before sunrise.It's just really unnecessary.There's one scene where a guy is being eaten by vampire-zombies in a car wash, while his girlfriend stands a couple feet away and screams "No!". We then see him being eaten for a while, and cut back to the girl still standing there, probably meaning she was just standing and watching the whole time.The acting is really not that good to be honest, it didn't really bother me any, but there are probably a lot of people that will be bothered by it, so I thought I should bring that up.Almost the entire soundtrack is heavy metal, whether that is a good or bad thing depends on the viewer. I personally liked it myself.Also, the movie is called "Darkness - The Vampire Version". OK, so there's another version? I thought it was just rough translation but according to the credits that list credits for "both versions" of the movie, I could be wrong. I wonder if the other version has more gore.There is apparently a VHS version and a digitally remastered DVD version with less gore but with some "spit and polish" applied to it like in the American unrated version of Dead Alive. I really don't know which one I watched, I don't think it would make much of a difference either way.6.5/10

I found Darkness to be just too DARK. It had a kind of cool idea and some ambitious ideas, not bad action scenes and a few splashy moments to make you go UGH! BUT, it was underlit to the point of confusion. You don't really know what is always going on in the dark scenes and for a film that is shot on Super 8 Film, you already have all that nasty grain to deal with. As with Nathan Schiff movies, it's just too much. Director Leif Jonker seems to want to make an original film, but he lacks the know-how to do it. The camera is never pointed in the right place, lack of fundamentals such as how to shoot simple dialogue scenes and how to light a movie hurt as well. The actors are all pretty uneven and hammy. But despite these negatives, the music is good, the gore is plenty and ranges from silly putty to really good appliances. Is this a classic like it says? Is it worthy of the two discs worth of praise? NO. But it is a good first try. Now if these guys would stop patting themselves on the back about this movie (from what I understand here the only one they have ever finished) for a while and try again, they may do better.

A vampire movie like no other. Leif Jonker should be praised for his attempts to drag the vampire genre out of the terrible goth phase its currently lingering in.A well written plot combines with great gore and some genuinely terrifying scenes to make a great movie. The sense of menace and terror is never far from the screen, and the end is truly horrific

Sure, the acting left much to be desired. Sure, the `plot' was nothing more than an excuse for Jonker to show off how gory he could make a film. But make no mistake, this guy has talent. For instance, Jonker's excellent filming techniques of people getting chased (and ultimately captured) by vampires were amazing for such an amateur director. My favourite scene (apart from the ending which surpasses the gore level of `Braindead') is the chase scene in the middle of the film where a guy gets chased down by a group of about twenty vampires. This little scene has to be seen to be believed. It's so fast-paced. Plus, the rock song played in the background while the chase was occurring was very rousing, and really gets your adrenaline pumping. Oh, and the lighting wasn't what made the film appear to be so underlit in most scenes; it was the exposure of the film. It seems to be WAY overexposed in most scenes. THAT is why most scenes seem to be so dark. The only main problem I had with `Darkness' was the way that in many of the outside night scenes, the lights from incoming cars from a distance were distracting, and that the film seemed to be too drawn out towards the middle, and at times, a few of the scenes were overlong, but the ending more than compensates for those small downfalls. Believe me, this film isn't for most people (I doubt that even most horror fans would touch this one), but rest assured, if you're a hardcore horror fan who loves gory flicks, this is the bloodiest that they come (which is a GOOD thing to people like myself). I'd take Jonker's `Darkness' over Raimi's `Evil Dead' films any day; at least Jonker has the courage to show carnage that Raimi never could pull off. My Rating: 8.5 stars out of ten*Side Note: I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that the creepy syth tune that played throughout the film (most noticeably near the end) was very effective. It had a sad yet forboding feel to it, and it sounded very familiar to a tune that I'm sure I heard somewhere else in an 80's song.