Darkhunters

At what point does a film become so bad it's good? Compelling in it's awfulness, Darkhunters stands out as a shining example of c**p cinematography and for that alone, probably deserves some kind of award.

The plot revolves around the age old battle of Heaven and Hell for the unclaimed souls of the recently dead. In the case of Darkhunters, the representatives of good and evil manifest themselves variously as a herd of cats, a hooded Grim Reaper figure with a face of flickering flames similar to a coal effect electric fire, a Philip Marlowe-a-like with a seriously bad manicure and a female psychologist who appears to be on day-release from Kwik-Save.

The protagonists are competing for the soul of a newly dead teacher who spends most of the film running around a foggy field and bizarrely, a boarding kennels in an attempt to evade his pursuers.

The plot is spread thinner than a dieter's sandwich with no character development or attempt to build suspense. The acting is laughable, comparable to a school play - although that would be an insult to many educational establishments. And the dialogue .......... oh, how my sides ached! With the unclaimed souls of the dead being described as "life's unwanted gherkins" by the flame-glow demon, you wonder whether Hell really is a McDonalds.

But is is bizarrely compelling, you find yourself watching just to see how bad it can get - at just over 80 minutes, it's worth the time spent for the unintentional giggles.

This movie really is that bad, and I'm normally a sucker for bad movies, but this was too much. Seeing this is like OD'ing on pure SUCK. Now, you may think you've seen the bottom of the barrel. You may have waded through every title from Full Moon and Troma, all the movies of Edward D. Wood Jr, Uwe Boll, Albert Pyun and direct to DVD-flicks from faded men-of-action. You may even have seen Death Tunnel, Ghost Lake and a vast array of the movies that MST3K covered, but in their original form. But you do not know truly awful film-making until you have seen Darkhunters. And if you haven't, you shouldn't. Don't bother. Not only is this movie amazingly poorly written, directed, shot, edited, acted and splattered in crude, cheap aftereffects. First of all, it's a pretentious mess. But not good, Greenaway or Lynch-style pretentious or hilariously messy in an Ittenbach or early Waters sort of fashion. It's the kind of pretentiousness that comes when someone incredibly stupid thinks they've come up with something incredibly smart. Sort of like M. Night Shaymalan (sp?), only that man seems like a freakin' messiah when compared to this trainwreck (and this coming from a rampant Shaymalan hater). It's also boring. Not heavy going-type boring, which is okay, if the movie awards your patience. Darkhunters does no such thing. It's boring in a "Oh my fu(king God, if I see another shot of a cat set to an obnoxious audio cue I am going to fu(king kill myself!"-kind of way.

Btw. anyone who claims to like this film is a boldfaced liar and anyone who claims this film is complex or deep knows what their mother is like in bed.

From the dire special effects onwards I was absolutely gob smacked at how bad anyone can make a film. Lets put it this way, I have absolutely no directing experience whatsoever and for the first time ever when watching a film I thought 'I can do better than that! whilst sat watching this pap. The acting in this film was terrible, I suppose the best actor was the guy from Lawnmower Man but the French guy from Aliens3 was so wooden I wondered how he got the former job in the first place. The storyline was mediocre and I suppose, like most films, If the rest had been done well it would have stood up. I don't usually write reviews here but after seeing a couple of people gave this film a good rating (must be cast/crew) I felt I had to say my piece to save anyone from accidentally hiring it or wasting their money on buying this cack.

Apparently the boundary between life and death isn't as cut and dried as I thought. Sometimes death makes a mistake and the soul of the ghost is fair game for demonic bounty hunters. Fortunately, Carol Miller, whose near-death experience as a child has given her insight into the next life, is there to help people caught between life and death. I wasn't expecting much when I took this film down from the video shelf, but I was pleasantly surprised. While flawed in many ways, I found the premise intriguing and execution professional enough to keep me interested throughout. It also didn't hurt to have Dominique Pinon in the film. He's always watchable as an actor, even if this script certainly wasn't up to the level of 'Delicatessen' or 'Amelie.' The script was a little convoluted, and the audience would have been better served if the back story had been introduced more coherently. Still, to me, the main problem was the special effects. Most of them were somewhat cheesy – although I did like the title animation.

I think some of the other reviewers here on the IMDb are a little too hard on this film. I have been going on a mind-numbing expedition through the straight-to-DVD fare at my local Blockbuster and this film is better than most!

It's a shame. There's an interesting idea here, but it gets completely lost in a confusion of Commodore 64 style computer effects and bad storytelling. The plot, such as it is, concerns a bounty hunter of souls. It should be a fairly straightforward hunter/hunted kind of story, but the director and/or the writer seem like they forgot what the movie was supposed to be when they were about three days into shooting. Things aren't helped by the fact that the main baddie looks like he's wearing a cheap Darth Maul mask, which they tried to disguise with flowing CG colors. Not much to recommend here, even the title seems to propel it into obscurity.