Against the Dark

Oh dear, Steven Seagel has been starring in very mediocre to poor straight to DVD films in recent times… and the digitally shot low-budget horror / action "Against the Dark" is another terrible outing. Actually I was expecting more Seagel, but really he's nothing more than a support character. Who does nothing much than wandering around, kicking in with some slaughter by samurai sword and whispering out inane dialogues.

The future is looking grim as the earth's population has succumbed to a virus that turns its victims into zombie-like vampires. The story mainly centres on a group of survivors held up in an abandon hospital; trying to get themselves out before the generator dies meaning they would find themselves trapped. Their only chance of survival seems to rest of a small group know as hunters led by Tao (Seagel in glory) who go around finding the non-infected and slice and dice those who are.

The premise feels like a sloppily dull mixture of ''Resident Evil", "Blade" and "28 Days Later". The predictably clichéd story has been done to death, but it's poorly drawn up (characters and situations with a script that thinks its got something insightful to say… no worthless drivel) consisting of senselessly dumb plot devices that it grows wearisome by feeling much longer than it is. What's going on is a lot of posing and little imagination to back it up. Ah there's a lot of walking/running here and then over there as the confined elements find themselves getting smaller. The gloomy visuals aren't too bad with some decently ghastly images, but when the action hits (with that overwrought music score)… it's a blotchy mess of purposely unfocused editing. The performances stand-up better (Jenna Harrison and Linden Ashby) than the pitiful material, but I found the characters reactions completely annoying.

Continuing my plan to watch every Steven Seagal movie in order, I just watched Against The Dark (2009)

Well, this one sucked. I thought it sounded fun Seagal fights vampire zombies after a plague and must escape, before the army plans to nuke the area. But it's all so poorly done. Seagal and his team are not the focal point of the movie, despite him being the lone actor on the cover (not unusual in land of dtv movies) it's more about a group of survivors who need to escape the hospital where Seagal's stunt man and his team are killing all the zombie's/vampires (what were they?? Only one had fangs, and she did that to herself) they can find.

Seagal only has about five or six scenes in the movie and he does very little in these scenes and he might utter a total of fifty words, which are mostly not him. I should find out who his stand in, stunt double is, as he did most of the work here. The movie is carried by Tanoai Reed (who, looking at his IMDB credits is Dwayne Johnsons stunt double) and an impressive Jenna Harrison, and these two do a good job carrying what little movie there was. If it were not for them, I would have turned it off.

If you want to see a movie that moves fast, has lots of zombie/vampire killing goodness with just barely enough plot, dialog and story to link all this murdering together, then this is the one for you. Otherwise stay away.

Well I watched this movie last night with my girlfriend.... And Ill say right now one reason it might have seemed worse to me is because I was watching it with my girlfriend and she sat there the hole time saying how bad it was, and how much weight Seagal has put on lol. HOWEVER this movie straight up was just horrible.

I am a huge fan of Seagal HUGE... I even liked some of his movies most people didn't, like Mercenary For Justice, Shadown Man, and Attack Force... lol OK jk about the last one.

But this movie........ there just was nothing good about it. It started off VERY boring, showing these people walking through a hospital and the one guy who played the Stonner (I thought) did a terrible job of acting. It would show a little piece of Seagal and his crew just to remind you that they are still in the movie... The final I would say... 20 minutes was decent with some good fighting. However the movie was SOOOO dark you couldn't see a thing which was very annoying.

I could get into every single detail, but you catch my drift. This movie (as lots have mentioned) Is NOT a Seagal movie. I actually heard from a few people that he took the script just for fun and support this movie.

Skip this piece of crap and wait for Ruslan to come out, as that actually looks like it could be in comparison to Urban Justice and Pistol Whipped.

I have noticed that some people are glad to see Steven Seagal move his career in a slightly new direction by leaving behind his traditional style of roles in favor of something of a vampire hunter in his new film Against the Dark (or "Last Night," depending on whether you're looking at the cover box or watching the cast and crew interviews), in which he is the leader of a small group of people who stalk through the night dispatching the vampires that the entirety of the human race have transformed into as a result of a viral epidemic.

Really? Someone was glad about this? Seagal has been one of my guilty pleasures for almost 20 years now, and while the vast majority of his movies are undeniably awful, there is always an element of fun in them that manages to come through even the stupidest story lines, but not this time. There isn't even any of Seagal's traditional style of ass-kicking prowess to be had here, he just walks through dark hallways occasionally hacking vampires to death.

Oh, and don't get me started on the vampires. The movie was written by a Mathew Klickstein, whose work displays a massive lack of even the slightest bit of writing talent. The movie begins with the explanation that a virus wiped out nearly all of mankind and that there were no vaccines and no immunity. Minutes later, a voice-over explains that "some of the wounded were immune, others just changed."

Nice. I like the narrative consistency. Later, after meeting several examples of what the human race have transformed into, one character explains, "Everyone thinks they're vampires, but they're not. They're mutants."

Is this for real? Vampires. Does anyone think these things are vampires? These are typical, badly performed zombies straight out of any cheap zombie movie. To suggest that they are vampires is to display a spectacular lack of understanding of one of the most basic tenets of horror movie lore. Vampires, among other things, drink blood. They don't tear out entrails in mindless feeding frenzies.

In one scene, one of the "vampires" tells one of the uninfected characters something like this, "We have evolved. We think, we talk, we plan…"

Yeah, but we know all about our evolutionary history, but we don't understand that we're zombies, not vampires. Consider, for example, Brad Pitt's and Tom Cruise's brilliant vampire performances in Interview with the Vampire, an immeasurably better movie. They are educated, they're philosophical, they radiate class and style. To say that the things in Against the Dark have evolved from them is quite a statement indeed. So let's just refer to the creatures by what they really are, shall we?

Steven Seagal's first line in the movie, by the way, comes after he and his team rush on screen and cut up a bunch of zombies that are closing in on a young boy. After killing all of them, Seagal says, "We're not here to decide what's right or wrong, we're here to decide who lives and dies."

What does that even mean? It doesn't matter, the entire script is stupendously dumb, and the movie reduces the destruction of all of mankind to a handful of people wandering around a darkened hospital trying to avoid getting eaten while they wait for Seagal and his crew to come save them. The United States Military, headed by Keith David (the movie's one completely wasted talent), waits outside for Seagal to do all the hard stuff.

If you were to make the sad mistake of watching this thing, I would actually recommend watching the extra feature on the DVD that talks about the making of the movie. Sometimes these making-of featurettes can be helpful in slightly changing your opinion of a bad movie, but in this case it is more interesting than the movie itself just to watch how completely deluded everyone seems to have been in making it. I can't understand how anyone at any moment of production could have tricked themselves into thinking that they weren't making a spectacularly bad movie, but they did it, man. They really believed they were onto something with this mess. Miss it!

Against the Dark staring Steven Seagal is certainly a departure from the standard formula employed in his passed movies. In this nonsensical yarn, the rotund Seagal plays the urban legend street fighting hero as always, but instead of battling drug dealing thugs or terrorists, Seagal is out saving the last vestiges of humanity from blood thirsty cannibal plague mutants. Seagal and a party of mostly lethargic companions prefer to make use of swords and knives to slice and dice their mutant antagonists which makes little sense since if the mutants were contagious with a dangerous communicable disease, drenching themselves in their blood would seem to be unwise. However, the courageous multi-chinned Seagal braves the endemic risks to rescue a pitifully helpless band of plague survivors (one has to wonder how in the world they managed to survive at all given their utter helpless condition).

As usual, Seagal's marshal arts skills are showcased and he demonstrates that even the likes of Orson Wells or Raymond Burr could have been marshal artists despite their physical handicaps. The real stars of this movie are the mutants and you might find yourself routing for them before it is over.