Dark Nature

Firstly I cannot believe I spent £5 to purchase this DVD... Daylight robbery...

The DVD case itself seems as if this could be a good film to watch, false advertising at its best...

"Tense, twisted, shocking and very bloody." BBC Movie Cafe "Pulls out all the stops... Sinister, sparse and enigmatic" The List "Ticks all the right slasher boxes." Evening Times "Has 'Cult Following' written all over it." Daily Record.

At this moment there is a big scandal into football match fixing, where is the investigation into film reviewers? How much are they being paid to lie to the public? They would make great politicians...

Bafta Award - New Talent Awards - Nominated Best Director Winner - Best Director International - HD Festival Winner - Best Cinematography - International HD Festival.

Who ever made these nominations and awarded these awards must have been on pure Crack! Someone needs to investigate them too..

I really enjoy my films and watch plenty of them, take this from me, save yourself a £5. Don't waste 76 mins of your life watching this... Or buy it as gift for someone you really secretly hate, so they have to suffer.

The plot is..well there is no real plot.. characters aren't explained... i'm left asking myself his relevance here is what? "Very Bloody" hmm no... Kept finding myself checking to see how long I had left to watch...

Thankfully The Matrix Reloaded has just came on tele, and has calmed me enough not to launch my tele, xbox and newly acquired Dark Nature DVD through my living room window...

Family holidays may frequently be a recipe for disaster, and this simple and effective thriller takes this maxim to its natural conclusion. A moderately dysfunctional family of mum, new boyfriend and kids drive out into the countryside to visit her mother for a holiday. Little do they know what they are getting themselves into.

Director Marc de Launay and writer Eddie Harrison combine to produce a delightfully nasty and violent thriller, which bears all the hallmarks of classic 70s exploitation cinema. This is not the only influence though, with nods also to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Gus Van Sant in restrained and sparse mode, and to horror maestro Dario Argento.

With red herrings, an appreciable sense of false revelation, a tasty dose of gore and a clean, clinical, functionally efficient feel to the picture, this is enjoyable fare. The dialogue is stripped of flannel, everything has a reason to happen despite an overall feeling of ambiguity and the direction shows an interesting ambivalence towards the central characters which poses more questions than it answers.

Dark Nature is a pleasing B movie. Small aims, nicely realised.

Perhaps when I took my seat, waited twenty minutes through darkness and up came a DVD menu on the cinema screen wasn't exactly what I expected. The film had a very limited cinema release (i.e. twice a week for a month in Cineworld, and that was it) so I was determined to catch at least one showing. When beginning to describe the film, low-budget doesn't scratch the surface, the whole movie no doubt filmed entirely on the Southwest coast of Scotland in the film-makers' back garden. It's a horror/slasher flick in all fragances but it fails badly to pin the woes of the killer on a "you're killing the earth, so we're killing you" twist. It's obvious that although the film tries its very best to be serious (it fails), the dialogue makes numerous nods to slasher films of yore (such classic lines like "He wasn't strong enough" and "The Earth fights back"). Why in God's name didn't they go all out B-movie slasher tribute style, I don't know - because the narrative strengths (if they exist) lie completely in the moments in the film where the killer is honing in on his prey. All in all, the film ends up lamehat because it indeed takes itself far too seriously when it really had no chance at all with the kind of budget it had. Gets a better rating because of the reasonably convincing gore and the slightly present "so-bad-it's-good" factor, but overall the producers should have thrown the script in the writer's face and said "bring back some GOAR!".

There's nothing wrong with paying respect to your influences. Many a genre film past and present has done this, and sometimes to great success. It's usually for not though, as many directors trying to respect the directors and movies that they love end up coming off as immature fan-boys or people without an original bone in their body. While Marc De Launay's "Dark Nature" doesn't fall for those traps, it's still a mess.

Somewhere in Scotland, a very dysfunctional family is on vacation. There's a bit of a problem though-there's a killer whose knocking people off. Oh, and some of the requisite oddball characters who exist only to be killed show up as well.

There are a few things "Dark Nature" get's right. The score is pretty good, some of the cinematography and footage of nature is beautiful, and the gore is pretty cool. That's where the fun ends though, as much of the movie is De Launay paying tribute to the likes of Dario Argento, Mario Bava ("Twitch of the Death Nerve" seems to be the primary influence here,) "Friday the 13th" and old ecological horror films like "Long Weekend." While he manages to thankfully do so without pilfering from said movies, he still gets a whole lot wrong.

For one thing, it's never that scary or intriguing. The aforementioned movies and directors managed to create a sense of dread and suspense to go with everything else. However, the director here seems clueless as to how to do that, as he can't even pull off a decent atmosphere. Also, all of the characters are extremely annoying. People like the entomologist and the psychic are supposed to be interesting in an odd way, but they are more annoying if anything. And don't get me started with the family, especially the daughter. So much time is spent with this obnoxious bitch that the viewer is left exhausted.

And then there's all of the talk. There's a lot of it here-and let it be known there is a difference between dialog and talk. Dialogue is interesting and helps with the characters. This movie is so talky that there were moments in which I started to remember the films of Andy Milligan-and that's not a good thing. Oh, and let's not forget the whole ecological message in the movie, which in a shocking surprise falls flat. The film wants to be a commentary on man's mistreatment of nature, yet it can't make that work. It instead comes off as a poor man's mix of "Friday the 13th" and Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist."

It's a shame that I didn't like the movie, as there are a few neat things in it, and I do think that it had potential to be good. What I got though was a talky, boring mess of a movie. I expect better, and the audience deserves better too. At least it's better than the movies of Dante Tomaselli.

Don't be fooled by the low budget - there are plenty of gory surprises in this bloody thriller about a family holiday gone horribly wrong, as well as a sprinkling of red herrings and twists.

Director Marc de Launay contrasts the shocks with lingering shots of the deceptively peaceful scenery (the setting is Cumbria but it was filmed in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland), but the accompanying score never allows the edge-of-the-seat tension to drop.

This is one for the genre fans - unlike in Hollywood slashers, there are close-up shots of the wounds and spurting blood. Not to mention a hands-over-the-eyes finale involving the optimistic setting of an ancient animal trap...