Cold and Dark

When Detective Mortimer Shade is somehow killed in a freezer, a parasite called a grail possesses his body, revives him, but he needs blood to stay alive. His partner John Dark accepts the new situation and together they become vigilantes, judging and killing the bad guys, with Shade sucking their blood with his claw. However, Dark notes that Shade is losing the rest of his humanity and becoming a monster, being aware and afraid of the danger Shade represents to mankind and trying to stop him.

Is something wrong with my eyes or was it completely intentional to make the cast and crew names at the start almost indecipherable? I could barely read any of the words on the screen. You would have needed to be watching this with a telescope to read the names. Anyways, onto the movie...

The story to the film is quite ho-hum but interesting enough to at least get you to watch it but it every time something is about to actually happen, it lets you down and shows nothing of interest. There are a few scenes which will grab you but it's not enough, there's just too many pointless conversations with all of the stereotypical foreign characters. If you don't like heavy accents, you won't like it either.

The basis on the movie is how Shade was killed and had the parasite re-animate him, which could have been a really cool scene but we never even get to see it. It's all off-screen which is what makes this film suffer as it is shot rather decently. I don't agree with some of the angles and effects used in certain scenes but it's not too bad.

The acting is okay, no great performances and a couple lousy performances (i.e. Chief of Police) but they do alright. The screenplay is a little confusing and jumps all over the place. The movie is very inconsistent with its pace and disappoints immensely. A few notably good gore effects hardly make up for this one and a half hour waste.

To sum it up, whenever you think something interesting is about to happen, it decides to stop and try again later and never pulls through. I'd avoid if I were you.

After being brought back from the dead by a parasitic creature, detective Shade is back on the street killing…and eating...bad guys. His partner, John Dark, realizes the situation is out-of-hand and tries to stop Shade before he fully transforms into a monster. This well-made by intensely boring British horror offering features good direction from Andrew Goth, who displays a strong visual style and a good eye for interesting camera angles. The entire cast gave very good performances, especially the golf-playing police chief (name of actor escapes me right now). The make-up effects were quite good, and if you like your horror movies gory…well, let's just say this is a VERY bloody flick and horror fans will not be disappointed in this department. Unfortunately, this is where the list of positive aspects ends. The plot is a big confusing mess, the violence is often mean-spirited, the narrative made no sense and the film is very poorly paced. Not unwatchably bad, but unfortunately dumb and dull. Oh, and did those CG shots of the worm-thing that comes out of Shade's hand look like crap or what?

3.5/10.

A standard good cop/bad cop film with a bit of a supernatural twist of an alien parasite that sadly doesn't really work that well. Dark and Shade are partners, Shade has tendencies to go over the boundaries of typical law enforcers. One day he survives a mysterious incident in a freezer and an alien parasite enters his body. I rather enjoyed the nihilistic tone, and there are moment that you think it MAY get better, sadly like empty promises that never come through, it doesn't. Hopefully, just like this film was a tad better than his previous "Everybody Loves Sunshine", Goth's next film, the Chow Yun Fat starring "The Wretched" will be a tad better than this. But even if it's not, the title will be apt at least.

My Grade: C-

Eye Candy: Christie Seary is topless, she's dead, but what are ya gonna do mate?; Carly Turnball shows a glimpse of ass, hopefully we'll see more of her in the future. A LOT more

Hip little flick with some ballsy ambition. The director is a guy to watch. The plot was a little twisted, but watch it twice and it gets better. Matt Lucas as Dr. Elgin was a brilliant piece of casting. Kevin Howarth I'd already seen in Last Horror Picture, but in Cold & dark he really gets to flex his acting chops. His performance is mesmerising. Luke Goss plays a good number, very mean and moody. Kinda like Jason Statham. I liked the way Andrew Goth goes for the cinematic shot. This guy shoots for the big screen and it works. But you can feel the tension against the low budget cutting in. There was just not enough time to flesh the good stuff out. Great gore FX in some scenes. The cottage blood bath worked a treat! The team behind this film have got something. I'll track 'em. A Gothic Western next? Cool.

Two violent English cops fight crime until one of them is infected with some supernatural parasite that makes him crave the taste of human flesh. The violence continues, but in a slightly different way.

The first thing that struck me about this film is the use of a blue lens, which seems to be a new fad in horror movies. "Saw III" used a similar tint, and I know I've seen it a few other places, as well. While I like the mood the tint brings out, this technique is becoming too obvious for me and I hope the fad goes away in a year or two because it's just going to get old.

Horror fans who like gore will like this movie, or at least like the gore in this movie, because there's plenty of it. In one scene, a man is waiting at a glory hole to get a little sausage. Moments later, plenty of fluid comes through the hole, but not what he was expecting. Minutes later, another man is shoved through a wall right in front of a hysteric small child, his face mangled to all hell. The violence continues like this for most of the film.

By the way, I also enjoyed the glory hole scene for its use of a Rubik's cube, which I haven't seen used effectively in a movie since the 1985 Chuck Norris flop, "Code of Silence". (Yes, I found a way to reference Chuck Norris in a horror film review.)

I was a bit distracted by the English accents, which are fairly thick and the volume is not loud enough to help you make the words distinct. This is sort of like "Trainspotting", but I found this even less easy to adjust to. I almost would have welcomed some Americans dubbing voices over the top of the film, despite my dislike of dubbing.

The director (Andrew Goth?) knows how to film a scene and get right where he needs to be. Early on during a rooftop scene, he implements some dynamite overhead directing, as if from a helicopter or from Superman's point of view. It was very nice, and much more than you usually get from people you've never heard of. Another reviewer said that Goth, "displays a strong visual style and a good eye for interesting camera angles," which I think is a great way to say it.

The movie sadly suffered from a convoluted plot, where I asked myself "who are these characters?" a few times. Earlier people are already forgotten by the middle of the film, and you aren't really sure what the underlying plot actually is. If the first half is drug dealers who don't show up in the second half, and the second half is about a parasite that never shows up until 43 minutes into the film, where is the consistent story? Also, another reviewer called the movie "well-made but intensely boring" and I would not necessarily disagree. While I was not bored, the lack of connection to the movie made it more difficult to get into what should have been a breathtakingly beautiful work of art.

I also never even figured out who the two main characters were, which I think is a huge drawback. I know the cops are named Dark and Shade, rather than Dark and Cold as you would expect, but I did not know which was which throughout most of the first half. I am pretty sure no background on them was offered and we had no reason to give a fig about either one of them.

I would recommend this film to others, mostly because I would like to hear more opinions on it. I think with some minor tweaking this would have been a great movie, and I hate to dismiss it out of hand on a whim. I would give it a second viewing just to be more sure of my thoughts on the movie. It is not bad, but I'm not sure if I can say it's great. Until further examination, I leave this film with a slightly-above-average grade.