Review of Near Dark (1987) by Jacob F — 15 Jun 2008

One of the few truly great vampire films and about the only one that's truly romantic; where characters actually seem to have real emotion, not just emotion played for mythological device. The film suffers from a few flaws in its final third mostly from a deus ex machina, which, while quite glaring, in the end strengthens the films themes, though on the surface it hurts the overall mood of the film.

The film was a box office failure partially because of the success of The Lost Boys released around the same time, and the bankruptcy of the De Laurentiis group which prevented any real marketing of the film.

However, the film is more like Blue Velvet thematically, the film that The De Laurentis Group was essentially created to release, than it is like The Lost Boys. Both (Velvet and Dark) are about innocence challenged when evil is found in the underpinnings of the romantic notion (or facade) of Americana, here the American west.

Both films are in a sense, a descent into hell (and not a very attractive one as opposed to Lost Boys) to find the value of what was forsaken. However, what Lynch is anxiously guilty about in Velvet, Bigelow embraces and sees with unprecedented optimism (considering the subject matter).