review

the media overload that has engulfed me hit me hard the other night, no idea what to watch or what to listen to… should i listen to the new ramstein cd or watch a dvd or a video or read….. i opted to just pick out a dvd.
i ended up with “cold and dark”; it’s a slick looking british horror movie. filled with interesting camera angles, an icy blue palette, hard boiled dialogue and delivery and a bit of gore. on paper that sounds like a great movie, have to admit it just didn’t keep me interested. my attention drifted and i moved from watching the movie to playing with my camera, back to the movie and so on.
while on a case john dark’s partner mortimer shade is killed but is kept alive by the parasitic monster: the grall. the scene where we know something is wrong with shade is when john dark (played by the buffed up luke goss) thinking his partner is dead is shocked when he jumps up, as they walk away another corpse spontaneously combusts. (the only problem here is that the opening sequences of the movie sets up shade as being something special and supernatural to start with…)

the case they are on is something to do with people smuggling. the ring they are after is protected. shade, now powered by grall, has powers and so together he and john dark throw out due process and do the right thing.
at first dark goes along with this, but he soon thinks that shade is losing his humanity and something has to be done about it.

and something is done, but hand on heart i was paying so little attention i think i missed it.
one of the reasons i found it hard to pay full attention to it was the moments of ott thesbing from one or two of the supporting cast. there is the scottish chief inspector, with a gorgeous clipped but full white goatee, who has a peculiar whispery and shouty delivery. rather than him being a man in charge he appears like a man who is on the merry –go-round of personality disorders.
then there is the appearance of matt lucas who can be an effective actor, but in this he goes from being sufficiently spooky to auditioning for a children’s television version of the x-files.
perhaps they were there to inject some black humour; instead it was just bad humour.

all in all it was a bit of a missed opportunity, but no close to being the worst film i have ever seen. i suspect i will go back to it again just to see how they got to the end of the movie.

i am not sure that the director is going to become the next guy r or quentin t, but he deserves to if only for his name: andrew goth.
it has to be a made up name.