WARNING! This post contains extensive spoilers for this movie. Watch the movie before reading! Or don't. You have been warned.
Ghosts of Darkness (2017)
Unrated
IMDB Says: “Two paranormal investigators are unexpectedly thrown together in the hope of solving a 100 year mystery.”
IMDB Rating: 4.7/10
Metacritic Rating: N/A
Rotten Tomatoes: N/A critics, N/A audience
Solee: 2/5
Mikey: 1.5/5
We watched this on Amazon Prime.
Mikey: So, we had a whole discussion before picking our movie. Would you like to explain how we ended up in the Darkness with Ghosts?
Solee: We try to have a good balance of different kinds of movies, even though I’d watch nothing but psychological thrillers if it were up to me. And we’ve had a dearth of ghost movies so far this year. You like your ghost stories! Unfortunately for you, I was wrong about this being a ghost story.
Mikey: Wait, you were? Oh I think I see what you mean. It counts.
Solee: Jonathan very clearly schools us on the difference between ghosts and demons. And he is adamant that this is a demon.
Mikey: He surely is. And to be fair, you can’t normally shoot or stab a ghost. I notice the movie poster for this one is trying to make us feel like it’s some action thing where our manly hero Jack goes around shooting ghosts in the face. It did not turn out quite that way in practice.
Solee: There’s not a lot of truth in advertising on that poster. We still haven’t gotten a true ghost story, but as far as demon possessions go, this wasn’t half bad. It was like if the Odd Couple had lived in a haunted house. I’d watch it.
Mikey: Well, to be fair, we just watched
Neverlake, which was a true ghost story. But WHOA we have some problems we need to address. This movie wasn’t half bad? Which half were you watching?!
Solee: I was watching the movie with the two mismatched co-workers who had to face wacky hijinx when someone accidentally loosed a demon into their workspace! Just kidding. I know it was dumb, but I kinda liked it. I think it was Jonathan that saved it for me, honestly. He was like if Rob Schneider and Johnny Depp had a love-child. He amused me. And he was good at what he did.
Mikey: Rob Schneider+Johnny Depp is an amazing example of the term “half-bad”! I agree with that though. The movie was more unintentionally funny than intentionally, but there were intentional funnies in there, and it was pretty much all on him. I think had they aimed at comedy instead, and dumped the wet blanket (Jack), they probably would’ve had something. The movie opens feeling like
Clue, with The Butler giving them their task in stuffy form, and they could’ve just rolled with that into the hijinx we were promised.
Solee: Alas that isn’t what happened. What we got instead was a demon that killed everyone who tried to live in the house within three days. So our intrepid ghost hunters had to stay in the house for three days to prove that it wasn’t haunted. Which is dumb because you can’t prove a negative.
Mikey: Well, they could’ve proved it’s possible to live more than 3 days, at least. Not sure how great that would make the house, though. This movie was made for almost no money (IMDB says 35,000 £), and it does show. There were parts where I found myself wondering if the bad dialogue would’ve sounded fine if it was just being filmed in a quality way, with good lighting and all that. Maybe some background music. But some of it was truly bad writing, as well. I also read that they had only 3 weeks to shoot the movie, and a month total including the casting and planning. I think I can see that.
Solee: With that information, I’m actually pretty impressed at what they got. They must have spent most of their budget on special effects. And fake blood.
Mikey: It’s true, when you think about that lame CGI demon we saw, that probably cost them a significant portion, along with all the makeup effects and all. I guess these actors didn’t cost a lot. This was wow. I’m not sure what to say. So many cheesy crazy things. I like when Jonathan found a train set in one room and said “Wow, these people must have been loaded!”
Solee: I liked when Jack fell in the pool! I also liked how the demon would show up in mirrors or in the background behind a single headshot. It was fun to watch for it.
Mikey: I’m always in favor of things to spot in the background. I did have a Deep Thought in my notes: I find that bad movies go overboard with the ghosts. In this movie, they’d see whole people running around, and blood on the walls, and all kinds of things, one right after the other. While a good movie might let a single door creaking open be all the ‘ghost’ you see for 20 minutes. They just think more is going to be better, when really it just makes it not so supernatural. I did note that it felt like this movie was written by a 14-year old. Especially when they decided to shoot ghosts in the face. And had hair metal play during the credits.
Solee: I get that they weren’t actual ghosts, but it felt weird to me that they were fighting them by shooting them and stabbing them. I can’t think of many other movies where a demon can be defeated or even injured by purely physical means. For a minute I thought that it had to do with how the people had originally died (you know, they were stabbed to death, so the demon was susceptible to stabbing in that form) but that wasn’t the case. It just felt strange.
Mikey: It didn’t appear to be the case, but it sure would’ve been way more quality if it were. But then we’d also need a whole portion of the movie dedicated to learning that and then beating them back the right way. That is way smarter than this movie ever even tries to be. Oh, a good one: The phone rings, Jonathan picks it up, and then looks puzzled. “There’s no dial tone,” he says. Because that’s not how phones work! The stupid demon had to call back just because they didn’t understand how the phone worked the first time.
Solee: To be fair … it’s been a long time since rotary phones where a thing. Maybe they just forgot. It was a little funny that Jonathan answered, and handed it off to Jack saying, “It’s your wife.” Then, only after Jack has a conversation with her, Jack tells him that she’s been dead for several years. And Jonathan totally took it in stride. I dunno … I thought it was funny. YMMV. The woman who played Jack’s wife did a good job with her role. It couldn’t have been comfortable to sit in a bathtub covered with red goo for all those scenes.
Mikey: That was funny. I really wonder if Paul Flannery (Jonathan) thought he was doing a comedy. He actually was good at that. But he was doing very broad comedy, which was very much at odds with the mopey ghost business and Jack’s terrible overwrought trauma. I just have to imagine that if they had just swung 30 degrees toward the comedy side, they could’ve come out with the next
Clerks. Swing and a miss. Jack even kind of reminds me of Dante.
Solee: That’s a fun idea. But we have to rate the movie they actually made, not the movie they could have made. Where does this one fall on a scale of 1-5 for you?
Mikey: Oh boy. I can’t deny there was fun to be had. But this was bad bad. Let’s throw it down with a 1.5. I don’t want to completely trash it, but I have to recognize that it was so badly done. What do you think?
Solee: I think I have to give it a 2. It wasn’t good, but it was fun, and I like fun! This would be a great Mystery Science Theater movie, don’t you think?
Mikey: I know Rifftrax does a lot of not-so-old movies like this. I would watch it for sure. Just as a tip to our readers, there are a whole bunch of old movies with the Rifftrax track overlaid on them available on Amazon Prime. Enjoy! As we will go ahead and enjoy our next movie tomorrow,
Leaving D.C.!
