DARKNESS: THE VAMPIRE VERSION (1993)

If cast members' names in Darkness don't seem familiar it's because they haven't gotten a second acting credit. This is a zero budget enterprise from Kansas featuring local actors. Unhampered by brand name stars, the narrative can unwind based on one cardinal rule: any character can be killed at any time. A few minutes before dawn we find John (Jake Euker) running through the night to the apparent safety of a convenience store where he excitedly tells the lone employee and customers (one of whom is a policewoman) that “he” is coming and they're all doomed, grabs the policewoman's gun, puts it in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. Soon Tobe (Gary Miller), John's neighbor who tried in vain to reason with the boy, is the only person alive in the store and is unwittingly set on a quest to find and destroy a powerful vampire.
The next night some teens returning from a concert find that most of the population of their small town have been slaughtered. Worse yet, the dead won't stay dead. These teens are isolated from all the institutions that make civilization, well, civil. There's no police presence: the policewoman is the third character to die. Family is either absent or has gone to the dark side. School, church, the military, none of these are even on the radar. It's up to Tobe to unite some unlikely vampire hunters and try to stay alive until sunrise. Gary Miller's performance as Tobe is especially poignant. He starts as an innocent bystander and, like Ripley in Alien, tries to maintain order and save lives. Miller's measured speech and the way he drops his voice into a lower register, trying to put some bass in his voice to be more authoritative, reminds us that he's not that many years past childhood himself.

The film becomes an extended chase as characters try, with varying success, to get away from the army of the living dead that has overrun the town. Finally there are at least fifty vampires on screen rushing to feed on the dwindling band of survivors before sunrise. Throughout the film, title cards inform us of the time relative to sunrise and sunset. When the vampires are exposed to ultraviolet rays their reaction is, especially considering the Darkness budget, spectacular. Blood flows, limbs are severed and throats are ripped. Nobody is going to mistake Darkness for a Meryl Streep talkfest. This is designed with gorehounds in mind: there's no love story, sub-plot, or subtlety. The film is unrated. Had it been submitted to the MPAA, my call is it would have been an NC-17 for gore and violence.
Although Darkness is rather crude, I'm still giving it a score of eight because it delivers the goods inherent in its premise, and then some. Writer/director Leif Jonker is a huge talent: it's a shame that he made this in 1993 and hasn't gotten another feature. Kudos to Barrel Entertainment for its accomplishment here. Be sure to watch the opening segment which shows graphically just what is involved in digitally remastering a video. Darkness looks great and the sound is crisp and clear. Scenes at night featuring pools of light isolated in inky darkness show just how good the remastering is. For adventurous viewers, Darkness comes highly recommended.