Le Jardin des ténèbres

In my opinion, this film was innovative and compelling yet at the same time it slightly lacked the ability to grip me as a spectator. Mind you, I watched the entire film and thought it was a good concept. The metaphor of the fathers drink addiction and his temptation for the devils urges was very well done. Adam Taylor Gordans superb acting performance was very well needed in this film. The ending was perhaps a little confusing, but, who knows, perhaps it was the best ending possible.

Storyline - 8/10, acting - 8/10, Cinematography - 8/10

I rate this film overall 8/10.

I recommend this film to anybody who's a fan of the genre, even though the genre escapes me right now. Try not to get confused by the plot like I slightly did.

When I sat down to watch the 2006 supernatural thriller "The Garden" here in 2022, it was without ever having heard about the movie. I stumbled upon the movie by random luck and saw that Lance Henriksen was on the cover. So of course I opted to sit down and watch what writer Samuel Vartek and director Don Michael Paul had to offer here.

The storyline, as written by Samuel Vartek, was fair enough. I mean, the story was well-enough paced, but the script did suffer from being somewhat generic and overly predictable. And sadly so, then there wasn't any surprises or any major ups and down throughout the course of the 92 minutes that the movie ran for. Don't get me wrong here, because "The Garden" is not a bad movie, it was just not an outstanding movie.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and I liked that they had cast Lance Henriksen for that particular role, especially since he was rather nicely cast for that role and pulled it off quite entertaining. I wasn't particularly familiar with the cast ensemble here, aside from Lance Henriksen, and I do believe that I might have seen Claudia Christian in a movie or two somewhere.

Visually then "The Garden" was okay. This wasn't a movie that was working heavy on the special effects, and the ones that were in the movie played out well enough.

There is a really good atmosphere in the movie, and that definitely helps to drive the movie forward.

My rating of "The Garden" lands on a five out of ten stars.

Beside good photography, the only other good thing about this movie was the skillful performance by veteran Lance Henriksen, (as old man Ben). Unfortunately, painfully, the other main characters seemed to have absolutely no sense of timing. This I attribute to directing/editing deficiencies. So many of the scenes are drawn out like taffy. Even parallel scenes belabor alternating imagery, least the audience miss the meaning of the juxtaposition I guess? Once the story got going I was optimistic that a provocative pay off was in store. Alas, it ended the way so many movies do, offering nothing more than borrowed meaning, delivering no message or perspective of their own.

I totally agree with you about the production values. Some scenes were breathtaking, and the camera shots were very well done. Very interesting, visually. Nothing cheap or slipshod in the cinematography, that's for sure.

The movie needed a better story, or a more clear story, or maybe some exposition scenes (the four horsemen, for example) should have been earlier in the movie.

When you spend the first two-thirds of the movie wondering what's going on, it's easy to lose interest before you get it figured out.

10 stars for the directing, editing, cinematography; 5 for the plot. It's worth a rental.

I saw this movie at the BIFFF (Brussels international festival of fantasy film) and found it struggling with it's plot material.

A young boy suffers from nightmarish visions and as a result has a tendency to put his body full of razor cuts. The boy resides with his father who is recovering from alcoholism and fails to be of support for his troubled son.

When father and son end up having a car accident caused by a vision the boy has, they get rescued by an elder man named Ben (Lance Henriksen).

Ben has a spooky air around him; vanishing and appearing at random pace throughout his ranch, always the sharp answer or life lesson on his tongue.

Ben has a weird agenda as he manipulates the father into alcoholism again and the boy into experiencing weird visions.

The movie tries so hard to build up the Christian undertone (think tree of life, adam & eve, apocalypse themes) but fails at each occasion.

The visions of the boy are the only up tempo sequences as the rest of the movie focuses on Lance Henriksen talking in Chinese fortune cookie lingo.

A shame, because the production values are there, the star (Henriksen) is wasted with this kind of script and the editing tries to contrast every moment of suspense with random actions (like heating up a stove, cleaning a fish, ...) This is B-movie material, a rental for the Henriksen fans, others should wisely avoid.