Review of Near Dark (1987) by Diego T — 30 Apr 2014

Cutler: If liking Drive but not The Transporter is hypocritical, then liking Near Dark but not Twilight is as well.

If there's anything to be learned from Near Dark, it's that Katherine Bigelow may never make a passable film. This ugly, campy, horribly acted trite is not just bad-it's insanely bad. Comparing it to Twilight may be going too far... okay, not really, because this too features vampires, a forced and underdeveloped romance between two unlikable leads, lack of motivation for all the characters, and hilariously bad dialogue. The only thing that makes this film a bit more bearable is the occasional humor and excessively brutal yet wholly engrossing gore. Other than that, make no mistakes: This film is a chore to sit through for all but the most devoted B-movie horror buffs.

Near Dark stars Adrian Pasdar (a great actor who went on to do many other spectacular films) as Caleb, a naïve young idiot in the Southwest. One night, he picks up a girl in his truck, and takes her out for a romantic drive. But unfortunately for Caleb, she is a vampire, and she bites him in order to make him one as well... because apparently they formed an unbreakable love in the one night where he tried to get lucky. This would be a minor complaint if so much of the movie didn't hinge on their relationship. Once he falls in with her gang of outlaw vampires, and they take an immediate disliking to him, she's the one that stops them from killing him or letting him die... again and again and again. Not only did these two only have one night together, but the dialogue and acting going on in their scenes is utterly reprehensible. If you thought "Better hold on tight, spider monkey" was bad, get a load of this. It's just repetitive, bland trite clichés from every romance ever, but with a slight vampire twist. Also, at least the vampires in Twilight were smart enough to live in fucking Washington, where it wasn't sunny every day of the fucking year.

In some sense, Near Dark is perfect. But it's perfect at the worst possible things a movie can attempt. Every scene reeks of B-movie campiness, from the laughable special effects to the jarring mix of overacting and underacting. Actually, calling this a "B-movie" is an insult to B-movies. At least B-movies are enjoyable. Every actor in this film either channels the craziest elements of Nic Cage or just doesn't give half a shit. Peter the psychologist from The Room gave a more committed performance than the main characters in this piece of shit. It's seriously amazing to me how much dialogue goes on in this film that tells us nothing about the characters or their motivations. By the time the movie was over, I was so confused and angry that I couldn't care less about how much it obeyed "vampire lore" or whether or not it was accurate to the concept of vampires. Okay, so the vampires burned up in the sunlight instead of sparkling. Whoop-dee-doo. Contrary to popular belief, a film needs more than a cool concept to actually be good. And when that cool concept has been done to the death already, the rest of the movie had better be pretty fucking spectacular.

Some of the cinematography of this movie is okay, compositionally speaking. Bigelow mixes a lot of blues and purples into every shot, but it's hard to tell if this is on purpose or just because that's what shit looks like in, you know, the dark. She also fails epically at continuity (the film switches from what looks like 3:00 in the morning to a rapidly rising sun in the span of two minutes) and steals the scene changes from Star Wars. Most annoying is the fact that the story, although interesting enough, was repackaged and used in another stupid Bigelow film: Point Break. A guy infiltrating a group of outlaws and becoming one of them, only to have to turn on them in the end? Yeah, never seen that before. But really, this just carries on the point that almost nothing about this film is creative or original, and it features completely uninvolving acting, dialogue, plotting, and storytelling. I never thought a movie as gory as Near Dark could be classified as "boring," but that's exactly what it is. It's a boring, dull, and wholly uninteresting slog that fails even as an unintentional comedy. Absolutely horrific.

Final Score for Near Dark: 2/10 stars. As much as I'd like to give this a full-on 1/10, I want to set it apart from such awful films as Thor: The Dark World and Sucker Punch. I may never be a true fan of the horror genre, but judging objectively, this film really is ass. I'd continue waxing poetic on the many glaring shortcomings of this movie, but just thinking about it has exhausted me. I think I'll need to take a break from the horror genre now, because this really took it out of me... I don't know how many more horribly acted "classics" I can sit through before my brain implodes.

Cutler, fuck you for giving this a higher score than Donnie Darko. If you seriously think this is an 8/10 film, you have no business judging acting.