Dark Cloud

For the love of God, will somebody please put an end to the horrific lighting that these people are doing today!? First it was the ridiculously nauseating "found footage" gimmick with everything filmed by what looked like cellphones, and now we have scenes "lit" (or rather not lit) in a style that would have gotten you kicked out of film school and banned for life from even owning a camera ten years ago! Every single scene is filmed in almost complete an utter darkness. Even when there is a light on in the room (which is rare), it might as well be a 4 watt nightlight bulb for all of the light it emits. Then, you have SO many scenes where the actors are backlit with absolutely NO fill light whatsoever, so all you see is a washed out background and shadows where people should be.

If it weren't for that mess, I might be tempted to give this a five or even a six star rating. Yes... the lack of / poor lighting was THAT distracting.

The story itself is nothing new. A girl gets placed in a test house where an AI (artificial intelligence) is supposed to look after her. But (and I am sure this is not a spoiler) the AI goes rogue. It's been done to death. I mean, the story is a little lacking, but it's an ok way to kill a night when there's nothing better to do. Just don't expect mind blowing entertainment and you'll be ok.

Right, well the 2022 sci-fi horror movie "Dark Cloud" definitely had a nice poster/cover, and the synopsis sounded interesting enough. Sure, I hadn't even heard about "Dark Cloud" from writer J. J. Kaiser and director Jay Ness before I sat down to watch it.

And talk about a snoozefest. Wow, this movie was just insanely slow paced and uneventful. I even drifted off to sleep once as the movie trotted on in a very monotonous pace with virtually nothing happening as the narrative slowly died.

I will say that "Dark Cloud" seemed to have potential, but writer J. J. Kaiser and director Jay Ness botched it here and delivered a stinking heap of a movie. Trust me, you don't want to waste your time, money or effort on this movie. I was bored to tears suffering through this movie.

The movie has a relatively small cast ensemble, and the actresses and actors are struggling with having virtually nothing to work with in terms of a proper script and storyline, interesting characters or riveting dialogue. Now, I wasn't familiar with any of the performers here, but I bet they were doing their best with having nothing to work with.

My rating of "Dark Cloud" lands on a generous two out of ten stars, based solely on the production value of the movie.

I have no idea why the other reviews for this movie are so negative unless they're "planted" reviews. This was not, by any means, the worst movie I've ever seen, far from it. The plot develops slowly, but not unlike the plot for HAL 9000 in 2001 A Space Odyssey also developing slowly, with an inexorability that grows more and more disturbing as the movie progresses. I've seen plenty of movies with cheap/shoddy CGI and effects, but the effects in this movie were very well done and had a good sense of realism within the narrative. Lastly, I thought Alexys Gabrielle did a very good job of portraying her character. I've seen countless instances of actors/actresses obviously delivering lines they were uncomfortable with or simply had no idea how to do it with any degree of realism, but that is not the case here. I hope other people will give this movie ratings that are considerably more fair to the production quality that went into it.

The movie is a slow one. It's not an action adventure shoot 'em up blood, guts and gore film. Not much happens over a long period of time. Eventually there is an ending. It's an ending which you would almost expect to happen as we've seen this sort of film done many times. There never seems to be a movie where tech goes right and everyone benefits. It's always the situation that tech goes wrong and people become enslaved. The first Matrix movie was good that way. It had a breaking free of the enslavement. Then they made the two sequels which crushed that freedom which was just lame. I'm sure they never expected it to have the success the first movie did. When it was successful they cashed in. The only way to do that was to have a Matrix 2.0 or was it 10.0 by that time. Who knows or cares. But it too managed to have humanity enslaved by the tech. Now you look around at the world now, and it's no longer old Nokia phones it's faces permanently buried into little black rectangles with fingers pecking like chickens at a feeder. The enslavement is here already right? Don't you think so? It's a sad state of affairs and one which this movie of course just ends up being that way.

Not only worse of the year. One of the top 10 worst I've ever seen. And I've seen around 5000 movies in the last 35 years.

Acting is terrible, nothing actually happens 30 minutes in. Very dull and slow.

Be warned, any positive reviews have to be part of the cast. You'll waste your time.