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Only EVIL Can Be Constructive Therapy for EVIL! “Dark Nature” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Battle Your Inner Demons By Battle The Exterior Ones in “Dark Nature” now on Blu-ray!

Joy walks on eggshells around hot-headed and explosive boyfriend Derek.  Almost having been killed by Derek’s eruption into anger one night, Joy manages to flee his wrath for six months.  Long time good friend and weary ally Carmen convinces the haunted Joy to join a therapy group overseen by a psychologist with unconventional healing methods.  One of those methods is backpacking into the mountain wilderness for a therapeutic getaway to face personal fear with three other women who also experience the familiar paralyzing and manifesting symptoms of towering trauma.  Miles away from civilization, the group treks for two days until an unsettling feeling of being watched and their supplies being stolen forces them into a face-to-face with a mysterious influence that reconjures their individual terror through sight and sound, leaving them incapacitated with anxiety.  When realizing the amount of danger mounding against them, the fear-facing trip through the wilderness will put that aspiration to the survivalist test.

“Dark Nature” is a women-led psychological creature feature surrounded by themes of abuse, trauma, and the handling of the psychosomatic stress when at rock bottom and faced with internal, or external, demons figuratively for traditional storytelling and literally for cinematic storytelling.  Calgary filmmaker Berkley Brady writes and helms her first feature length film in 2022 from a storyteller’s collaboration with Tim Cairo, screenwriter of “Lowlife.”  Shot in the copious thicket of the picturesque and idyllic Canadian Rockies that stretch the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, Brady’s scenic beauty parallels a skin deep exterior amongst a character group seemingly okay in the open-air while within the wayward withholding of crises becomes too burdensome to bear alone.  Brady and Michael Peterson co-produce “Dark Nature” under Nika Productions and Peterson Polaris in association with the Indigenous Screen Office and Telefilm Canada in this this Dread presentation, the production company subsidiary of Dread Central, and Tim Cairo, Kalani Dreimanis (“Polaris”), Jason R. Ellis (“Mother, May I?”), Patrick Ewald (“Turbo Kid”), and Katie Page (“The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot”) serving as executive producers.

The cast comprises of five women at the core and one man hovering around the peripheral like a lingering, festering open sore.  At centerstage is Hannah Emily Anderson (“Jigsaw,” “What Keeps You Alive”) in character throes of relationship lamentation and a cracking psyche over the tumultuously violent and rarely passionate ex-boyfriend Derek, played convincingly cynical of his partner by Daniel Arnold (“Even Lambs Have Teeth”).  First meeting Joy, over a stove of a steaming dish and on the phone in an exchange of concerns and pseudo-comforts, audiences will already be in bed with the young woman’s nervous fraught when a sullen Derek steps into the apartment as she tries to appease him with his favorite food and positive inquisitively around his day.  A tense exchange of words turns into a lust entanglement of pre-sex kisses and touches that spirals into a physical aggression that has nothing to do with foreplay or sex.  The abusive opening act sets the tone for Joy’s edgy mindset into the early and middle acts as she’s standoffish and verbally combative and questioning everything about the group’s choice to venture into the wild under the unconventional means of one Dr. Carol Dunnley, casted by an over the years, well-versed television and movie doctor, or authoritative mentoring figure, Kyra Harper (“Hellmington”), with others continuing to rake over an unpleasant past.   Métis raised actress Roseanne Supernault (“Rhymes for Young Ghouls”) joins Helen Belay and “Don’t Say his Name’s” Madison Walsh as the other nature walking companions seeking a renewed lease on life.  While Belay broods in secrecy with a jaggedly defined backstory of a possible abduction or maybe something worse with Tara, Supernault adds a coping comedy mechanism with her former military background that has caused Shaina intense flashbacks.  “Dark Nature” might not be their characters’ exclusive story but certainly they’re components serve a pieces of the psychology behind it as well as fodder for the forest-dwelling fiend as the narrative aims to fragmentally unfold more of Joy’s affliction that not only cull reasons why this trip may or may not be a good idea but also challenges the friendship strength between her and Carmen until Joy can face down and take responsibility for her unprincipled stance on the seared in fear that renders her powerless and controls her.

“Dark Nature’s” adianoeta works excellently to service both the reclusive avoidance in seeking desperately needed help and the sinister presence lurking and stalking through the lush mountain weald.  Yet, audiences will identify more with the latter because like the principal Joy people tend to avoid their own problems and redirect to another pressing issue that has really nothing to do with them or affects those as a whole, turning a person’s dark nature into not a generally relatable theme no matter how intrinsically installed it is into the incorporated picture.  While seemingly sweeping with Joy’s entire circumstances, we’re led to believe the anxious woman remains haunted by her past, her abuser having this hold over her akin to Stockholm syndrome, as while on the trek through the mountainside she can hear his voice, hear the repetitive clicks of his Zippo lighter, and even experience his tight grip around her throat but Brady winds up the narrative with a few vacillating curveballs that pull toward difference directions to swing-and-miss from being squarely hit until the grand reveal of explanation.  Even then, the explanation retains some purposeful vagueness with an antecedent anecdote of an ancient indigenous people once offering sacrifices to a spirit on the very land the group is treading on.  The tale doesn’t offer much detail and certainly isn’t a full-proof explanation of what ensues but adds that comforting layer of setup into what becomes madness erupted from a furtive, cave-dwelling creature shellacked in a black muck and with supernatural abilities of emerging a person’s most personal fear.

A psychological creature feature that offers worse things in the world than one’s own personal demons comes to Blu-ray home video from Dread’s physical distribution partner, Epic Pictures.  The AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD25, presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 aspect ratio, of “Dark Nature” looks undoubted sharp with details even if the color graded is somewhat desaturated.  The decoding of data details nicely around the foliage, skin features, and even in darker scenes with black levels not succumbing to any compression artefacts.  “Dark Nature” has two English audio options with a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo of crisp sound design with a surround the wagon barrage of audio cues casting out through the back channels to denote an autonomic attack when alone in the woods.  Dialogue is clean, clear, and sorted out through the chaos with a perfect depth and reverberation from outside-to-cave-to-cave-to-outside.  An eclectic range is spread-out through the tale from the flashbacks adding explosions and whizzing gunfire to the guttural roars and bush movements of the creature that resemble an enclosing chill of being watched.  “Dark Nature” marks the debut score for the Canadian band Ghostkeeper and while the additional of delicate broodiness sweeps over the images, creating an ominous overhang for much of the picture, I wouldn’t say the score adds to the film’s soul in the subtilty of the low, whispery tones. English subtitles are available.  Special features include an audio commentary track, also hidden within the audio setup, with director Berkley Brady, makeup artist Kyra Macpherson (“Red Letter Day”), and costume designer Jennifer Crighton, a handful of deleted scenes cut for timing, Ghostkeeper stop-motion music video (1.33:1), and an oddly incorporated short film from “Dark Nature’s” editor David Hiatt (“Bloodthirsty”) entitled “Peanut Butter Pals,” a Scooby-Doo mystery solving trio comically and melodramatically tracking down a cave monster, “Dark Nature” trailers with a countdown list of a theatrical, 30-second, and 15-second trailer, and Epic Pictures trailers including “Colonial,” “Satanic Hispanics,” “Tomorrow Job,” “The Lake,” and “Woman of the Photographs.” Physical features are slimmer with a traditional snapper and a rather generic cover art of Joy and Carmen covered in blood superimposed in the foreground of a forest. Disc pressing has the two actresses, still covered in blood, reappear but this time within the jaws of a creature. The region free Blu-ray clocks in at 86 minutes and is not rated. Berkley Brady’s woodland set neurosis knot never says die in the face of adversity no matter the form in the filmmaker’s female-driven debut.

Battle Your Inner Demons By Battle The Exterior Ones in “Dark Nature” now on Blu-ray!

Father and Son Bring EVIL Down Upon a Tormented Detective in “Darkness Falls” reviewed! (Vertical Entertainment / Digital Screener)

Posted by Steven Lewis on


Los Angeles detective Jeff Anderson has his perfect world turned upside down upon discovering his beloved wife dead of suicide in their apartment bathtub. Losing his bid for Captain and having his life be in utter shambles, Anderson becomes obsessed with lurking around incoming suicide calls on the CB radio, trying to make sense of his wife’s sudden reasoning to end it all. When a similar case produces a survivor from a familiar fate as his wife’s, Anderson learns two men are behind similar forged suicides stretched out over the past ten years against prominent women figures in and around the L.A. area. The detective spins a wild theory that has him following every lead to track down and stop the father and son serial killers without any backup from his local precinct, forcing his hand to choose whether to be a cop and uphold the law or seek lethal retribution for the woman he loved.

From French director Julien Seri comes “Darkness Falls,” a crime thriller released in 2020 that is entirely shot in English, a first for the French filmmaker who helms a script from the executive producer on “Starry Eyes” and “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot,” the Belgium native, Giles Daoust. Also produced by the Belgium, the film, that was formerly titled “Anderson Falls,” gorges on the detective exemplar of the prodigal crime fighter stripped down to next to nothing before regaining footing against the two experienced serial killers out to reduce the highly professional woman population with one bottle full of sleeping bills and one razorblade at a time. “Darkness Falls” is an exaggerated piece of nurture versus nature on systemic toxic masculinity seething under the guise of one man’s oppressed childhood from the abusive women in his life and then enlightening his son to his ways while the open minded, Renaissance man climbs back up the mountain toward redemption, not only for himself or his wife, but for all women being forced in a dual parental role. “Darkness Falls” is released under the production companies Koji Productions, Lone Suspect, and Giles Daoust’s Title Media.

Despite the international production and filmmakers, the solid cast is compromised of familiar faces from respectable actors, starting with not-the-Elsa-“Frozen’s” Shawn Ashmore. Ashmore, who I considered to a steady part of any project – he’s phenomenal in Fox’s “The Following” with co-star Kevin Bacon, – finds himself in the shoes of a L.A. detective who has fallen by no cause of his own, but as consumed as detective Jeff Anderson is with proving his wife’s murder, Ashmore doesn’t sell Anderson’s convictions and doesn’t properly apply Anderson’s super sleuth talents to wade through the sea of angst and torment. Anderson’s also written poorly as a man who consistently lingers around suicide call-ins and has constantly has numerous visions and memories of his wife that serve little to her importance to him, serving more toward just being story fillers instead of providing a little more value to Anderson’s character. What attracted me more to “Darkness Falls” was Gary Cole as one-half of the father-and-son serial killer team. Cole takes a break from the Mike Judge and Seth McFarland humor to stretch his legs amongst the thriller genre, playing an unnamed dark toned character derived from hate, abuse, and the thrill of seeing women die. Cole’s performance is a step above Ashmore’s lead role, but still flat, flat to the point of almost monotonic pointlessness that doesn’t exalt his need to kill high profile women. “Darkness Falls” rounds out the cast with Danielle Alonso (“The Hills Have Eyes 2”) as a Anderson’s former partner turned police captain, Richard Harmon (“Grave Encounters 2”) as Gary Cole’s accomplice son, and the legendary Lin Shaye (“Insidious”) as Anderson’s mother.

While “Darkness Falls” conveys a strong, if unintentional, message that grossly sheds light on the overstepping male view toward the idea of a successful woman, director Julien Seri missteps multiple times through the dramatics of a cop on the edge of the law and on the brink of despair while also not completely rigging out Gary Cole and Richard Harmon with more conniving wit, especially when their kindred reign of terror is well versed throughout the years. What fleshes out from Ashmore’s rolling on the floor and spitting shade performance at pictures of women on his crime wall trying to get into the head of the killers and Cole’s character who relinquishes freedom in sacrifice, even after a daring great escape from a botched crime scene that involved killing two cops in the process, is this weirdly uncharismatic collapse of a story from within the parameters of a well-established cast and premise. “Darkness Falls” barely pulls out a believable crime thriller that can only be described as vanilla, a term that stakes the heart terribly knowing that Shawn Ashmore and Gary Cole deserve so much better just from their lustrous careers and polar acting styles that don’t counterbalance the dynamics at all in this film. The original title, “Anderson Falls,” is fresher salt than the stale, rehashed title change of “Darkness Falls” to, perhaps, gain traction in a fruitless action of selling more tickets, adding even more vanilla flavor.

Releasing on VOD and Digital this month is “Darkness Falls,” an unrated release, courtesy of Vertical Entertainment. Streaming services such as iTunes, Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, FandangoNow will carry Shawn Ashmore’s 84 minute sordid themed detective thriller as well as all major cable and satellite companies. Since this is a digital screener, the audio and video aspects will not be reviewed, but if running on digital and VOD, the presentation should be excellent provided that your internet’s not sluggish and a good connection is established. I will say that the score by Sacha Chaban is against the grain with a brawny anti-brooding soundtrack more suitable for intense action than stylish poignancy than ends in uninspired ca’canny. That’s also not to say it wasn’t a good score. There were no bonus material included with the digital screener and no bonus scenes during or after the credits. Sitting through “Darkness Falls” was tough to sit through as the anticipation for the morbidity level to increase with due pressure onto detective’s Anderson’s browbeaten shoulders for a hellish ride solving his wife’s untimely death was never sated, sputtering along as a halfcocked story with performances to match.

“Darkness Falls” available for rent on Prime Video!