Nightfall – review

Director: Kevin DeLullo

Release Date: 1999

Contains spoilers

One of the taglines of this movie is “You’ll pray for daylight!”

Hmmm… Quite frankly, no. You see, I sleep better when the sun is down, call me old fashioned, and as the film droned on and on I really felt that I was falling asleep. Eyelids became heavy and a desire to shut down all waking thought overcame me. You see, the film is just that darn boring. There is, however, a brief shining moment of lore.

The film concerns special agents Jack Talbot (Jeff Rector) and Brian Guthrie (Adam Smoot). Jeff Rector, you may recall, was the lead actor, the director and the writer of the flick Revamped. One hopes that Revamped was an attempt to blot this from memory, it wasn’t a perfect film but it was certainly a vast improvement on this. Smoot as Guthrie seems way to young to be an FBI agent – even on his first assignment, something the script does recognise.

They hunt the killer of at least 10 women, all drained of blood and all with needle like marks on the neck. They haven’t a clue, seriously not a single one. So Brian gets them a lead by asking psychic Ann Vorhees (Cherry Love). Now, though the spelling is different you’d be thinking – a killer on the loose and advice from someone with that surname, not a good mix. She is on the level however.

Jack can’t see it and so lets Brian check out the address she proffers on his own. He finds a body and realises the person is still alive. He cuts the bonds but the person has turned and attacks. Somehow Brian manages to stake his attacker through the heart. Does he then go for backup? Does he heck, he wanders down to the cellar! In there he finds a lot of bodies.

Now this is the shining moment of lore, though it is only later that we discover what we are looking at. In this vampires and water don’t mix, and that is any water. Also a bite is likely to turn a victim. The bodies in the cellar have been thrown into a shallow puddle of water and later we discover that vampire victims are placed in water when the vampire is preventing them from turning. We won’t go into the impracticality of any water hurting vampires as it takes away from the nice moment of putting the bodies in the water.

Brian, however, is not in the water and is attacked by the main vampire (Thomas Dives) and killed. The vampire then escapes and sends himself, hidden in a coffin, by plane to a new city. When reports start coming through of deaths, Jack heads out that way and soon becomes convinced that he is dealing with the undead.

Unfortunately, by then you are lucky if you’re not fast asleep, your mind retreating to the Land of Nod in order to escaping the endless boredom of the images on screen. Not even the one decent (ish) effect is enough to rouse you from lethargy. This effect is when a vampire burns in the sun, though it is less burn and more melt. It is not as though the film is particularly bad – compared to other low budget, straight to video flicks. It isn’t. But, my word, it is just plain old tedious and lacklustre.

1 out of 10 for the water lore and the fact that the film isn’t exactly poor, just mind numbing.

The imdb page is here.