Writer: Tyler Hisel
Director: Jack Heller
Evil’s Roots Run Deep
Dark Was The Night (aka Monster Hunter) starts on a timber site. A group of loggers go missing at the end of their shift – only for their bodies to be discovered half way up a tree.
Switch to a nearby town a few days later and a rancher is reporting some of his horses missing. A little later the town wakes up one morning to strange tracks in the snow. Sheriff Shields (Kevin Durand) is initially sceptical about ancient stories of a beast in the woods but slowly becomes convinced.
As a monster movie it’s pretty well done. There’s lots of foreshadowing and menace without the need for explicit violence and gore. The creature stays in the shadows and there are plenty of different hints as to its possible nature – everything from Bigfoot to Old Nick himself. The final confrontation in particular is very well done.
The trouble is that Dark Was The Night isn’t actually a monster movie.
Warning bells start ringing early when we learn that Shields is separated from his wife, has a cute kid and is mourning the loss of another. The chiming becomes almost deafening when we get all the religious comments.
This is actually a story about loss of faith. On one level it’s Shields’s loss of faith in himself. This in turn reflects loss of faith in God; in case anyone missed the last point, the final showdown is in a church. Oh, and Shields’s son is called Adam…
Nothing wrong with rounded characters and a subtext like that if it’s all subtly woven into the story. But here it’s doled out in simplistic, unappetising lumps. What should be an accent ends up taking over and overwhelming the main storyline.
So there is a good monster movie buried in here and Heller shows great class in those scenes. But Hisel’s script is unbalanced and unsubtle, leaving Heller little decent material to work with.
The good bits of Dark Was The Night are very good, but there aren’t enough of them.