Dishonourable Mention: Absence of Light

I said some time ago that perhaps I need a dishonourable, as well as an honourable, mention section. Well, I’m not going to create a new index area – this will be listed under the honourable mention index – but I could hardly call this Patrick Desmond film anything other than dishonourable.

The plot of this movie is a confused mess – partly because of the need to throw everything bar the kitchen sink in. The stunts are poor, the CGI is bad, the fact that it is shot on cam is distracting in a bad way and the acting is poor with fluffed lines aplenty, leaving the viewer with the curious feeling that perhaps another take was needed. Worst of all is the plethora of cult stars in the film, why they were there is beyond me and they were so miscast it was untrue. Michael Berryman, Tom Savini, Tony Todd and Caroline Munro – I look to all of you. Unfortunate, as I had been quietly excited about this because Caroline Munro was in it.

I mentioned bad CGI and it truly is badly constructed, poorly textured and awfully matted onto film. Scarily there are commentators on IMDb who try to tell us how good the computer effects are… they aren’t. Of course the sin is that they had Tom Savini on set, a man who could fart better physical effects than the computer ones they had on screen. Why wasn’t his talent exploited? I don’t know.

Which brings us to vampires… the vampire scene is little more than a dream sequence that agent Puritan (Richard Conant) has. It has no real story impact, they are just dream vampires and nothing more. I guess that the filmmakers had some fangs handy and wanted to do something with them. Be that as it may we have three vampire women (of course, after Dracula, it is always three) who are not affected by the cross (Puritan has no faith) and like to suck a little blood.

That brief sequence aside there is little else for me to do but mention that the imdb page is here and leave you with a rogues’ gallery of those who should have known better: