It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Blistering performances.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

James Coburn hosted this short-lived anthology series where he presented each tale literally from a darkroom, where he would develop pictures that would relate in some way to the story. This only ran for 7 episodes, and the reason may have been because it so relentlessly cynical and downbeat, with rarely a happy ending for anyone. This might work once or twice, but for most of the 16 segments it must wear the viewer down, and make them turn it off. Did feature future stars like Helen Hunt and Billy Crystal. "Night Gallery" did this sort of thing better. Not yet on DVD, but was on YouTube for awhile. Universal studios owns it, so perhaps Shout/Scream Factory will release it?

Fun little EC-ish horror anthology series that lasted only seven episodes on ABC in 1981/82. Each episode had 2 to 3 short stories in it with a total of 16 stories in all. The best of these being the 1-2 punch of "Needlepoint", a VERY short voodoo revenge story that scared the living hell out of me when I was 4 years old (no V-chip back then), and "Siege of 31 August" with Ronny Cox as a Vietnam vet who gets his just desserts for terrible war crimes. Too bad it only ran half of a season. Universal really needs to release this on DVD soon as stars like Billy Crystal, Helen Hunt, Brian Dennehey, Claude Akins, and more gave this short lived series some much needed future star power. Here's hoping they're reading this.

Only lasting six episodes, Darkroom proved why anthology series can work, and why they can't.Way too many of the short segments were clichéd (oh no, yet another 'man has a chance to change the past' story), obvious and dull. And then they'll throw in a story like "The Boogieman Will Get You", or the one with Billy Crystal to tease you into watching again, hoping for one good moment to make sitting through the bad moments worthwhile. Every so often they delivered, but not enough to work on a whole.James Coburn tried to give the show a presence, but a show like this lives and dies by it's writing, and all too often it died.

If you love films like TALES FROM THE CRYPT or shows like THE NIGHT GALLERY you`ll like DARKROOM . But if you hate these types of shows then there`s unfortunately nothing here that will endear DARKROOM to you , the only real difference between this and its predecessors in the anthology series is that it stars James Coburn , well stars maybe isn`t the word because he`s only used as a links man to introduce the stories . As for the stories themselves they`re not at all different to anything THE TWILIGHT ZONE or NIGHT GALLERY had already done , and you do get the feeling the idea was well past its sell by date by 1981