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Released by: Phase 4 Films
Released on:January 10, 2012.
Director: Chris Kazmier
Cast: Daniel Baldwin, Sunny Doench
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
The Silence of the Lambs was a good enough film on its own but it suffers from what I call the “NOFX Effect.†This comes about when something good is released on the world and then everything good it represented is soon drowned out in a flood of mediocre-at-best imitators who ape the form but lack the substance.
A Darker Reality is not even a mediocre stab at remaking SotL. Its script was apparently written on a cocktail napkin and the film made under the idea, “Hey, we all hate women, right? Okay, let's go with that.†Calling it exploitational would be a disservice to exploitational cinema - this is just a sordid mess, uneven and unclear, lacking any redemptive qualities that would make it the slightest bit watchable.
Daniel Baldwin is The Ghost, the serial killer of women, apparently trying to find his perfect woman. Fortunately for him the most incompetent FBI profiler (Sunny Doench) is working on the case much like she'd work on a sudoku puzzle - from the comfort of her sunlit dining room, sipping coffee and having pleasant conversation. Sure, there's a strong male cop involved (James Burns) but he's apparently never heard of investigation, evidence, crime scenes, etc.,. This leaves the director to fill in many scenes of The Ghost terrorizing his victims without the benefit of a script or direction. It's just one humiliation after another for women. I guess that really hasn't been done enough on-screen in the history of filmmaking so we get more here.
Oh and the ending? It's even more nonsensical than the rest of the movie, leaving this reviewer angry and wondering if there's a market for a film where the serial killer subject material hunts down incompetent filmmakers who waste the world's time...
Video/Audio/Extras:
The disc presentation on this DVD is actually pretty solid so no blame can fall to the folks at Lightning Media and their work here. The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack captures all of Ghost's half-mumbled rants with exceptional clarity and the widescreen 1.78:1 image, while usually comprised of shadows, actually stands quite strong with very little blockiness that typically haunts such discs/films. The trailer and 5 deleted scenes are included, keeping the list of extras small and, thankfully, keeping the amount of time a reviewer needs to keep this disc in their player mercifully short.
Summary:
Pointless waste of time but presented well. So there's that. Ugh. The true “darker reality†of A Darker Reality is that such garbage can be produced and distributed.
