` `
Home
Send Email
Saturday, January 17th

Upstairs at 8:30 PM

The Dark Place
 
The Dark Place - Trailer
The Dark Place

(2014, 87 min)

Country: U.S.

Director: Jody Wheeler

Studio: Breaking Glass Pictures

Language: English

SYNOPSIS:

Keegan Dark (Blaise Embry) returns home to make peace with his long-estranged family in the heart of California’s winery valleys. What he finds instead is a harrowing mystery, with himself at the center — and his very life at stake. The Dark Place follows a flawed hero with an incredible gift, a witty and sexy sidekick and a deadly mystery that will sneak up and propel viewers along an action-packed ride of mayhem, madness and murder


REVIEW:

After a somewhat boring opening sequence where two characters sit and talk for about ten minutes, The Dark Place kicks into high gear with an assault and other plot progressing elements that quickly leads the young couple, Keegan and Will (played by Timo Descamps), to Keegan’s mother’s estate where things start to escalate even quicker. People are getting assaulted. People are getting beat over the head with wine bottles and locked in storage units. People are just being plain creepy, too. I would not consider The Dark Place a horror film by any means unless you find those Lifetime Original Movies to be scary. More-so this title relies on a good old mystery who-done-it with drama, romance, and the slightest remnants of horror and science fiction woven in. Still, the who-done-it aspect of the movie was what kept me interested. It was obvious what the criminals were after from the start, but who was the mastermind behind it was the big question.

Besides Jake Bishop (played by Sean Paul Lockhart). You know from the first time he comes across the screen that he is one of the bad guys. He was very good at playing the villainous role and interchanging his moods from warm and friendly to murderous at the drop of a hat. Lipman was great as the lead actor, another spot on casting choice, because he had a dark (yes, it’s a pun) quality to him that’s only highlighted by his impressive yet overbearing never-ending onslaught of sassiness; yet he still managed to come off as personable enough. Descamps did a fantastic job at playing the boyfriend that wants the approval of the family, one who seemed so sincere in his love for Keegan on screen that I was impressed by his depth as an actor. Shannon Day, however, was by far my favorite character and performer in The Dark Place. Wow. She was… amazing. I couldn’t help but smile every time she was on screen because she was the stand-out. Charismatic and maternal and so intelligent. I was hoping she’d have a super-power to by the end of the movie to make it more science fiction based – parents always pass down their powers to their children in movies – but that was the only part of her character development that wasn’t fulfilled. Loved her! Casting directors Patti Carns Kalles and Steven Tyler O’Connor get a massive round of applause for picking the perfect cast.

And the movie looks pretty, too. It has a high production quality in terms of all the little puzzle pieces like nice angles, great lighting, decent special effects, fun scorings, and all that good stuff. But, what I really liked is that everything seemed high class to me. Nice clothes, nice cars, a beautiful mansion with the quaintest grape orchard outside. You can tell this movie had a budget. All the characters are refined and say things along the lines of, “Drinking wine is like drinking time.” Meanwhile, I’m over here at The New Jersey Shore drinking my overflowing cup of cheap red wine out of a red solo cup. I glared a couple times and thought, “Damnit. I want your life,” except without people getting shot in my living room… and the trips to the hospital… and the weird older/younger incest… Ok, maybe I want half of Keegan’s life. I just want to be rich! Anyway…

The Dark Place was much better than I was expecting. I knew going into my viewing that I wasn’t exactly the film’s target audience, but again the gay elements in this movie are not smacking you in the face… like a penis. At times I completely forgot that that was one of the film’s angles because I was more involved in the deep, ever evolving mystery of who was trying to kill Keegan and his family. Fantastic actors, great set designs, a clever and sassy script, and an awesome never-before-seen super-power… You can’t go wrong here. Again, gay men and women looking for a fun, romantic suspense-thriller are going to get a kick out of this. Judging this film for what it is I’m going to give it a 9 out of 10. It’s far from horror, but it accomplishes what it set out to in a big way.

-- MGDSQUAN, The Horror Society (http://www.horrorsociety.com)