Dark Feed

Dark Feed is one of those films that looks cool, so you keep watching because something amazing is going to happen, you can feel it… So you keep watching and waiting… and waiting… Until the movie is over and you're like, "Damn, where did the past hour and a half go?" Dark feed had all the cool lighting, sweet sounds, awesome camera angles and shots of a horror movie, but with no movie. I really wanted to like it, but it really had no story and really weak dialog. It almost felt like a reality show a times, where you're just watching people on a film set work and talk about everyday life. The last 20 minutes of the film started to get interesting but I also felt like it didn't really matter because 70 minutes before that made my brain shutdown. A very bleak horror film overall, but it had major potential to be something amazing… Unfortunately it fell flat instead. I gave it a 4 instead of a 3 because the last 20 was pretty decent.

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DARK FEED is yet ANOTHER film set in an abandoned old psychiatric hospital with a disturbing past. The characters of the storyline are a group of film-makers shooting a low budget horror flick (hooray for self-referencing) who soon find themselves menaced by something much more real and disturbing. As the tagline went...who will survive and what will be left of them?

The answer is not a lot, not that you'll care as this is strictly ordinary horror fare for the masses. DARK FEED is the kind of film that low budget filmmakers love to make, because it doesn't take a whole lot of effort or imagination or indeed talent on the part of the crew. The acting here is resolutely poor, the special effects limited, and the plotting almost non-existent.

What we're left with are a handful of loosely connected scare and kill scenes, some of which are pretty gory by genre standards. In the film's favour, it does manage to summon up a couple of relatively intense and frightening scenes, like the hands coming out of the wall, but these tend to be loss in a jumble of the merely ordinary.

A screenwriter visits the set of his horror movie in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where a dark force begins to create its own drama.

Ouch! I gave this a shot because of some good recent IMDb reviews and the writer/directors also wrote The Ward, a passable hospital horror. Problem starts with the screenplay, which trowels on 20 different characters who get lost in a series of choppy, ineffective scenes. Most of the dialogue is pointless, failing to give impetus to the dark force, and the threat is confusingly both internal and external as ghouls creep out of the shadows and the cast goes insane. Plus they chose a really lame protagonist. Total mess and very hard to sit through despite the short run time.

On top of that is the damn music. It's mostly simple, eerie strings and plinky piano - but it never turns off. Even when the odd dramatic scene comes along the dialogue gets swamped, and the music completely drains other scenes of their creepiness when silence is needed. Very close to hitting the eject button.

Hard to judge the actors, because their characters were so badly drawn - a bunch of squabbling 13 year olds - and their lines were so pointless and lacking in intelligence or information.

Camera was also poor. Lots of reflection on the lens and bad lighting of the actors.

The story did develop pace in the end, but overall just awful. A much better film in this genre is Grave Encounters.

I am increasingly amazed that projects like "Dark Fall" and the people responsible for them somehow manage to get investors, and ultimately a distro house like Lionsgate to put it out.

This HAS to be a tax-write off scam, a "Spring Time For Hitler" scenario where the joke's on us, the viewers, and the IRS. No one viewing the rushes, or reading the script could not have missed the fact that this was SciFy Channel quality, low-rent drivel. Ergo, it had to be planned that way so investors could declare a loss on their income for 2012, thus taking the IRS bite and rendering it insignificant.

Everybody gets a REFUND!......a bunch of 20-somethings get a summer project, get stoned, drunk, have sex, all on the investors' dime, which will inevitably come right back to the investors' pockets. Also, how many times has that run-down hospital been used in films lately?

WHY WOULD SOMEONE MAKE A FILM LIKE THIS ? The plot of the movie was uninteresting and basic, the characters were so irritating, the location was so dark. The jumpscares were lame. I understand that it was a low budget horror film, but the result wasn't nice at all. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything nice about the movie... The effects were so bad and unrealistic (which was predictable, because it was a low budget movie).