Okay, before I start my review, I would like to make something unmistakably clear, DO NOT BELIEVE ANYONE WHO SAYS THAT THIS MOVIE IS AS GORY OR GORIER THAN DEAD ALIVE AKA BRAINDEAD!!! The amount of gore in this movie was highly disappointing, save for one long vampire melting sequence near the end, there are some stabbings, some bitings, a lot of off-screen stuff, maybe two or three actual on screen deaths. There was actually so little gore in the movie that I stopped thinking of this movie as a gore film and started looking at it as an '80s style B-horror movie, and it actually was entertaining in that aspect. Nevertheless, there are still several other little things in this movie to bug you and/or get on your nerves. Including but not limited to:
- The vampires... or zombies... or both,... Yah, I'm not really sure what they were.
- In the first part of the movie, the film constantly cuts from "19 minutes to sunset" to "2 minutes to sunrise" to "23 minutes to sunset" and so on and so on and so on. It does this a LOT, sometimes with nothing happening in between.
Cut to two minutes before sunset, guy sits in his car, cut to twenty minutes before sunrise.
It's just really unnecessary.
- There's one scene where a guy is being eaten by vampire-zombies in a car wash, while his girlfriend stands a couple feet away and screams "No!". We then see him being eaten for a while, and cut back to the girl still standing there, probably meaning she was just standing and watching the whole time.
- The acting is really not that good to be honest, it didn't really bother me any, but there are probably a lot of people that will be bothered by it, so I thought I should bring that up.
- Almost the entire soundtrack is heavy metal, whether that is a good or bad thing depends on the viewer. I personally liked it myself.
Also, the movie is called "Darkness - The Vampire Version". OK, so there's another version? I thought it was just rough translation but according to the credits that list credits for "both versions" of the movie, I could be wrong. I wonder if the other version has more gore.
There is apparently a VHS version and a digitally remastered DVD version with less gore but with some "spit and polish" applied to it like in the American unrated version of Dead Alive. I really don't know which one I watched, I don't think it would make much of a difference either way.
6.5/10