Against the Dark

• Directed by Richard Crudo
• February 10, 2009 (Direct-To-DVD US)

In a world devastated by a disease turning people into creatures resembling vampires a squad of ex-military vigilantes are attempting to rescue a group of survivors trapped in a hospital.

By any stretch of the imagination, Against the Dark is certainly a movie. At 94 minutes it qualifies as that. If you want to watch a movie this is certainly one of the many options. Then again so is the burning yule log video that people break out at Christmas.

If you are going into this expecting Steven Seagal to be an important part of the story you will be disappointed. Others have timed it and say his character is in it for about 24 minutes, but that’s being generous as some of his presence is that of Steven Seagal’s body double or recycled footage from earlier in the film. His character’s name gets mentioned about one time and I forgot it pretty quickly.

The lighting is incredibly poor. There are moments when you can’t see anything. Poor lighting often hides the cheapness of a movie. Done right it hurts nothing. Done poorly it makes a film so much worse. What do you think happened here?

This story takes place in a world ravaged by a disease that turns those infected into zombies or vampires or mutants (the film can’t decide which as it uses the terminology almost interchangeably) so people meander around with swords slashing away during the night when they can only be active cutting them. Why not locate them during the day and dispense with them when you have an advantage? Reasons.

This goes without saying but this would be a much better film if Steven Seagal wasn’t in it. Not a great film but rather just a much better film. And it is not just because it is Sensei Seagal. Seagal for his part feels like his character was inserted to stretch out the movie as well as give it a little star power-and I use that term loosely. I find it reminiscent of some of the direct-to-video Bruce Willis films I’ve seen or even a few Nicolas Cage movies from midpoint in his time paying off his tax bill. It looks like the movie was filmed and then he was added in with minimum judicious editing.

Seagal does his best Blade impersonation with a flaming sword in hand while wearing black leather. But he moves so slowly. Marvel gave us The Day Walker. Steven Seagal here gives us The Night Waddler. His action scenes are him waving his sword around made to look faster by the use of quick cuts. Unfortunately the blade flexes like a sawblade in an old cartoon.

Everyone in the creature hunting portion puts in about as much effort as Steven Seagal does which is not much at all. Tanoai Reed as Tagart is a bright spot in that area but only when it comes to action. As body double to his cousin The Rock he has some quality experience there. But his acting is rough.

In the OTHER movie we are dealing with a military operation planning to bomb the area and as one would expect Keith David is the rockstar there. That feels like a whole other film stylistically and just with the talent we get. What does not make sense is they plan on bombing the area right at dawn. While the sun would technically be up, there would be enough shade for the zombie-vampire-mutant creatures to at least flee some distance. Maybe go at noon-ish?

The women in this were hired to be eye candy. There are two in here and I didn’t believe this when I first heard it but only one has one line which is “Yes sir” and you would be challenged to discern which. Others commented on this, but it sounded too stupid to be accurate. Beyond that they do zilch even though they are part of Seagal’s crack team. They scream and, well, look pretty.

I am confident the issues with the story proceed from Steven Seagal coming on board and demanding changes because he didn’t like this, that, or the other thing. This may never have been great but because these people were desperate to have a recognizable name in this movie it never had the opportunity to try to become at least adequate. This was just poorly done. It is slow and lazy. It just takes forever to get from Point A to Point B. By the time the credits roll you just want the pain to stop.

Against the Dark is a crime against cinema as are many films with Steven Seagal’s name attached these days. It’s not a guilty pleasure or so bad it’s good. It’s just a festering turd designed to give Steven Seagal a paycheck and by default ruin the careers of anyone involved. Avoid!