Against the Dark
One of my favorite film reviews of all time comes courtesy of Chas. Balun (the gore flick aficionado who gave us Deep Red magazine). Chas is incredibly insightful and certainly knows how to turn a phrase (some of his reviews are much more thoughtful than the films they’re covering…) but there were times when he knew that a movie just wasn’t really worth the effort. His review of Monster Dog (an awful 1984 horror flick directed by Claudio Fragasso and featuring Alice Cooper) simply said this: “Title tells all. With Alice Cooper. Fuck it.” I’ve spent the past few years hoping to one day find a film that I could review so eloquently in so few words. Steven Seagal’s Against the Dark is the closest I’ve come. If I were doing a Balun-esque review of this flick, it would go something like “A paunchy Steven Seagal is a poor man’s Blade in this wannabe vampire/zombie thriller. He’s barely in the movie. Fuck it.” See? It’s close, but I’m no Chas Balun. I’ve got like three times as many words there as he did in his Monster Dog piece.
Truthfully, though, we could end there and call it a day. I think everything important you need to know about Against the Dark is covered. You know who Seagal is playing, you know he’s still carrying some extra weight, you know he’s splashed on the cover of the box to get you to rent it but is really only in the film as an extended cameo, and the “fuck it” pretty much tells you it’s not worth seeing. That being said, if you actually want to get down to the nitty gritty of why Against the Dark fails in almost every way possible, I guess I can spare a few hundred more words detailing it.
It should be clear from the “micro review” that Against the Dark is really just a low budget version of Blade. In a post-apocalyptic world (where food is still apparently plentiful if Seagal’s weight is any indication) most of the population has been infected with some sort of disease that turns them into blood-craving monsters. They’re not quite vampires, nor are they zombies, but instead they look and act a lot like the rage-infected victims from 28 Days Later (just one more source that Against the Dark borrows from…). Seagal leads a group of leather trenchcoat-wearing, sword-slinging badasses–known as “hunters”–who’re private citizens trained to dispatch the infected with extreme prejudice. In the other part of the film, a group of non-descript people are running around an abandoned building (trying to escape for some reason that’s never really adequately explained-although the military is going to nuke the place later, the people in the building wouldn’t know that…) asking each other repeatedly if they’re infected. Eventually the two sides meet up and the film sputters into second gear…which is about as good as it gets for Against the Dark.
I’ve already mentioned that the film borrows ideas from Blade (Seagal looks like a chubby white non-vampiric Wesley Snipes) and 28 Days Later. It also feels similar to Night Hunter, an old Don “The Dragon” Wilson direct to video horror/martial arts flick from the 1990s. I only mention this because it allows me to think back to the good old days, when Seagal, Van Damme, and Wilson were all popular action movie stars who were constantly engaged in verbal battles with each other over who was the toughest. It was a golden age-it was like real-life professional wrestling. I always found it funny because Don Wilson was a professional fighter who’d won belts…I can’t help but think he’d have mopped the floor with Van Damme and Seagal. I imagine Seagal would have put up a better fight though. Ah, memories…
That last paragraph pretty much encapsulates how viewing Against the Dark went here at Casa de Bracken. I’d be watching the movie, then I’d spot something and I’d zone out and start thinking about something more interesting. After a few minutes, I’d catch myself doing this and think “okay Bracken, enough of that-back on the clock! This a serious film that deserves your undivided attention!” I’d get back into it for a few minutes, then it was back to daydream land.
Another example of this would be that for most of the first three quarters of the film, Seagal’s scenes generally revolve around him walking through doorways and dumpy rooms. If this weren’t bad enough, the film shoots him from the waist down in a lot of shots. I would ask myself if it was even Seagal in the scene or if they just got some dude to put on boots and black pants and do the scenes for him. This invariably led to me wondering if Against the Dark might be the first ever film to employ a male “leg double”. You can see where this is going, right? How does one become a “leg double”? What does it pay? Do you put that on your resume? “April 14, 2007-April 18, 2007: Steven Seagal’s Leg Double. Job Duties: Wore black pants and boots and walked through a lot of shitty looking sets.” I bet there’s a union for leg doubles…Hollywood has a union for everything.
Similar tangents would happen every time Seagal speaks (he makes the odd decision to go with some weird whispered southern twang this time out), or when one of the infected turns up (here I’d find myself thinking “why can’t I be watching a good zombie/vampire flick?” which would invariably lead to me thinking of films I’d rather be watching instead of Against the Dark) and so on.
If Seagal had actually been in this movie for more than 15 or so of the 90 minute run-time, I think Against the Dark might have actually worked. I bust on Steve for his weight, but this guy would still kick my ass even if he weighed 350 lbs. He doesn’t do anything too crazy in the action scenes here, but I find Seagal’s movie fighting interesting even when he’s not doing much. He’s like the lazy guy who makes doing even the most mundane thing look very complicated. Seagal can’t just cut a guy with a sword, instead he has to swing it around in some complex patterns and change his grip a few times before finally delivering the killing blow. I like that. I have no idea why.
Unfortunately, though, the film spends more time on the lame characters who aren’t hunters. Seagal apparently only took the part as a favor to one of the producers or something. Naturally, producers (being very moral and honest folk) then decided to plaster Seagal on the cover and put his name there too-without mentioning that Seagal is only in the movie for a fraction of its running time. Anyone tuning in expecting this to be a full-fledged Seagal movie is bound to be disappointed.
Anything else that Against the Dark does wrong (and believe me, there’s lots more…) isn’t really worth talking about at this point. If all of the above doesn’t dissuade you from checking this movie out, then you sort of deserve what you get. I wouldn’t call this the worst Seagal movie of all-time (because he’s not in it enough to even really call it a Seagal movie, and also because he’s made some real crap over the past few years), but that doesn’t exactly make it recommendation worthy, either. Fuck it, indeed.
Horror Geek Rating: 1 out of 5
Tags: Against the Dark, B movies, Film Reviews, martial arts movies, Steven Seagal, vampires, zombies
February 26th, 2009 at 8:41 am
I have been waiting for someone to review this one, as it immediately went to a very long wait in my Netflix Queue.
I am disappointed to hear that it is even worse than I expected it to be, and I am extremely disappointed to hear of Seagal’s running time – bummer!!
Thanks for the heads up Mike!
February 26th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Sure thing man–I hate being the bearer of bad news (okay, I actually love it–but this is an exception), but it’s a pretty mediocre flick. I’d still Netflix it, but that’s about as far as I’d go to see it.