The Dark (1993)

The Dark (1993)

Dir. Craig Pryce

Written by Robert C. Cooper

Starring Steven McHattie, Cynthia Belliveau, Jaimz Woolvett, Dennis O’Connor, Brion James

            THE DARK (1993, as opposed to the underrated 2003 John Fawcett film of the same name, or the 2018 German horror film which also has the same name) is a fun, silly little monster movie with a big heart and an absolutely unforgivably generic title. I mean, seriously, THE DARK? Some of the movie takes place at night, and some of it in dimly-lit underground tunnels, that is the extent to which this movie has anything to do with darkness of any kind. What it does have to do with is a giant man-eating super-rat, and it absolutely screams for a title like TUNNEL OF UN-LOVE or TY-RAT-OSAURUS REX, or BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS or something like that. Or KING RAT. Something colorful. Something with some personality. Something that would let you know you’re in for a good time if you’re the sort of person who would enjoy a movie with a giant man-eating super-rat. I do not feel THE DARK adequately conveys that point.

It begins by introducing us to Gary “Hunter” Henderson (Stephen McHattie, PONTYPOOL, MOTHER!), a normal guy who happens to be a witness to some kind of subterranean monster attack while moodily drinking whisky in the rain at his wife’s gravesite. This gets him on the bad side of fanatical FBI agent Buckner (prolific 80’s character actor Brion James, BLADE RUNNER) who is super pissed at this mysterious TREMORS wannabe for killing his partner. He threatens Henderson if he ever talks about what he saw, and takes the additional and possibly unwarranted step of also beating him up right there in the FBI interrogation room, just in case.

Of course, he didn’t count on the fact that this incident would transform “Hunter” into a leather-jacket wearing, whisky-swigging-in-the-rain motorcycle-riding rugged individualist outlaw scientist who devotes his life to hunting the monster. So two years later, he’s back in town with a James Dean wardrobe and a duffle bag of monster-hunting tools like fucking Van Helsing. He suspects the town graveyard where he first glimpsed the beast is the key to discovering its identity. Why it took him and everyone else two years to figure out that this subterranean critter lives in the same spot they last observed it I don’t know, but anyway he spent the two years becoming a badass with that very particular set of skills it’s gonna take to bring this errant man-eater to justice.

This has been his sole, all-consuming obsession for exactly 712 days, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be distracted by a quick side quest to forcibly eject a rowdy biker harassing the waitress at a local diner, and then get his ass kicked by the tuff’s two friends who were apparently just sitting outside while opponent #1 had a leisurely coffee at the bar(?). Fortunately, it turns out the waitress --whose name is Tracy, (Cynthia Belliveau, BLUE MONKEY)-- always wanted to abandon her life and live on the road with a devil-may-care monster-hunting badass obsessive, so she grabs a shotgun, saves him, hops on his bike behind him to make a big escape, and, just to put a period at the end of the sentence, she shoots the bikers’ parked hogs, causing a huge fiery explosion and the tuffs to look really bummed out while despondently muttering, “that bitch!”

            Obviously this kind of exciting day calls for a night of hot sex, which the two quickly accomplish. But don’t forget that he’s a loner, Dottie, a rebel.

“You think you can just save my life, have sex with me, and then leave?” She asks, scandalized.*

“This is something I have to do alone,” he grunts. But of course, she’s gonna tag alone.

            McHattie is always good, and he seems to be having a lot of fun playing the stoic badass cliche here. He has a bunch of sarcastic one-liners (“I hope I’m the only one here who’s hungry,” he later quips, while infiltrating a giant monster tunnel) which he wisely reads with uniformly straight-faced seriousness. This is absolutely the right move, because it makes him seem less like a lame teenager who thinks he’s funny, and more like some kind of slightly deranged zen master prone to sharing little nuggets of philosophy. It’s a performance that gets the goods out of the ol’ outlaw hero chestnut while still being just a little bit loopy, which is a good description of the movie as a whole.

 It’s no surprise McHattie is great, but, amazingly, I think I actually like Belliveau even better as the up-for-anything Tracy. She plays the role with a really endearing dorkiness, full of earnestly goofy line readings that somehow make it make perfect sense that this is the kind of lady who would discover Hunter’s scrapbook of moody giant primordial rat sketches, and rather than getting weirded out that he’s an obsessive monster-hunting nutcase, instead frets that he might be married. When the asshole biker guy calls her “bitch,” she responds with, “Are you too stupid to read?” and then when he looks blank and confused, she points to her nametag and says, “‘bitch’ is not my name,” with an attitude that she honestly can’t imagine how this guy could be stupid enough to think her name is “bitch,” I mean honestly, who would be named ‘bitch,’ anyway, that’s just ridiculous on its face. She’s completely adorable and frankly I would watch a dozen more movies this terrible or slightly worse starring this pair.

            Anyway, while all this is going on, we’re also introduced to the pair of gravedigging grunts at the local cemetery where this is all going to be going down. Like MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, one of them is rich guy’s son Ed (Jaimz Woolvett, J.A.G.), who has been sent to do some blue collar work (digging graves?) to build some character. Unusually and enjoyably, he’s not some stuck-up prick, and his his scruffy blue-collar boss Jake (Dennis O’Connor, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS) is not a judgemental asshole. They have an agreeably easy-going relationship. I like that Ed can joke about how this job sucks in a good-natured way, and Jake doesn’t take offense, in fact he cheerfully agrees. The fact that Ed will one day leave and be a rich guy while Jake will still be stuck digging graves is obvious to both of them, but it doesn’t stop them from enjoying a certain friendly camaraderie while they’re both here.

It’s a friendly town overall, apparently, give or take a trio of homicidal bikers. The kind of place where some kind of stoic renegade monster hunter actually named “Hunter” can show up at your place of work, hold everyone at gunpoint, and deliver a long speech about how they must sacrifice whatever it takes to catch an undiscovered giant carnivorous mammal for science, and nobody seems to find this behavior especially alarming. Everybody’s almost immediately on board after his big pep talk, and seem to intuitively grasp that he’s the good guy, and they should do what he says.

“I should check in with the department” says a local cop, who’s just had her partner ripped to shreds in front of her eyes and is being held at gunpoint by this wanted criminal who just shot up a diner earlier today (Neve Campbell, WILD THINGS!).

“Don’t give us away. Not yet.” he cautions.

“OK,” she says, cheerfully.

            Of course, that asshole Brion James is lurking around, so we know this lighthearted jaunt to catch a man-eating prehistoric rodent is gonna get complicated. But most of the movie is about our little crew of makeshift heroes getting together and cooking up as foolproof a monster-hunting plan as possible given that only one person present was even aware of this little monster-rat situation prior to this afternoon. This plan will mostly boil down to one or two of them leisurely wandering around the subway-sized honeycomb of tunnels which apparently crisscross this particular graveyard and, one would assume from their size, an area approximately the size of New Hampshire. But fortunately, it turns out the architect happens to be nearby.

They really built a full-sized giant rat-horse creature, which is exactly the kind of hustle that I am incapable of not being charmed by. They could have just cranked out a shitty hand puppet and shot around it in the dark, but they didn’t settle for less, they went the distance did the lord’s work. The head looks really cool and menacing, even if the body is clearly two guys in a puppet suit, shuffling their feet in a manner which very much recalls Snuffleupagus. But it’s a unique design, recalling some kind of weird critter that might turn up in THE DARK CRYSTAL. It looks good, and you eventually get to see a good bit of it. It has a lot of personality, fierce and threatening while still very clearly being just a weird living creature acting on instinct. It might eat some people, but it’s not its fault, it doesn’t know better.

The monster suit is pretty nifty, but there’s not, in all honesty, an overwhelming volume of whammy here; there’s a few teases early on, but the rat doesn’t show up much til the very end, and even then the action is pretty small-scale. The movie has a friendly, low-stakes slacker vibe, a lot of people wandering around having conversations about what they should do. That could easily spell death for a horror flick, but it’s a surprisingly big-hearted movie, which clearly has a lot of affection for its silly characters. This is endearing enough to compensate for the fact that it also means there’s a ridiculously low bodycount, and the few deaths we do get are actually taken seriously enough that they’re not that fun. Which is to say, the movie actually banks on us liking these characters and caring about what happens to them, and generally affords them enough personality to manage that. (SPOILER) Jake the gravedigger, upon his death, says, “Just tell Ed to cremate me. It’ll save him some trouble.” It’s a funny line, actually, but he says it very sincerely. He knows it’s a joke, but he’s also trying to convey his affection for the young guy. I like it.

Its big-heartedness even extends to the monster, which both the hero and the villain want to catch, but the hero is adamant about leaving alive. This is where the problems start to become a little more pronounced than the charm, because a monster movie where you’re afraid for rather than of the central critter is a horror movie which is functionally broken. Brion James is a greasy asshole, but he’s no substitute as a villain for a 7-foot-tall rat monster. You want some personality in a low-budget creature feature, and THE DARK has more than most of its peers, but you also need to remember why we’re all here, guys. Having a nastier, more ill-tempered critter and some solid gore would go a long way towards making this a good movie, instead of just a mildly worthwhile curiosity.

And yet, while “good movie” may exceed its grasp, “mildly worthwhile curiosity” it certainly is. All its parts are pristine genre cliches, and yet they never quite escape the feeling of being off-kilter and alien, simmering with a lively weirdness which is never blatant but is also completely inescapable. Director Craig Pryce would go on to episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark and Goosebumps, which feels right for the movie’s childlike, unironic soft-hearted love of monsters and corny tough guys. Writer Robert Cooper would go on to the endless Stargate TV universe, which is harder to square with this material, except in the sense that this was definitely written by a man utterly unafraid of cliche. I suppose it’s not exactly a great loss for mankind that neither of them ever did anything like this again, but for a bottom-shelf creature feature cheapie with a completely generic name, just being amiable enough to be watchable was already much more than I could have reasonably hoped for going in.

Alternate opinion: “the creature itself is very poorly designed.it is evident in more than one scene that it is simply just someone in a big ape-like suit.the monster is not an ape,but this is close of a description as i can come up with.” [sic] IMDB user “disdressed12,” who has apparently never heard of rodents, October 30, 2006.

*I’m guessing she hasn’t seen too many James Bond movies. And actually, strictly speaking, she saved his life. All he did was rough up some guy who was being rude to her and then start a fight which wrecked her place of business and got him stabbed. But it’s hard to deny his leather jacket and badass hog make a pretty good case for him being the hero, so I understand her confusion.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	It Will Consume You.
TITLE ACCURACY	It is slightly darker underground, but they have flashlights and stuff, and it seems kinda like burying the lede when there’s a whole universe of killer rat names available.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None, though there are several other movies with the same title, and even a movie called THE DARKNESS from the very same year!
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Canada (which possibly explains the unexpected friendliness)
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Neve Campbell would briefly go on to be an A-lister, so it’s no surprise that she’s far and away the worst actor here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen McHattie
NUDITY?	Brief sex scene which features some demure boobs but quite an unexpected amount of Stephen McHattie’s well-toned toned ass.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Giant Rat attack!
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Brion James is stalking our heroes and noting their movements
MORAL OF THE STORY	You’re going to need to plan for more than a scant two years if you’re going to try and force the employees of a graveyard to catch a giant man-eating rodent at gunpoint and expect everything to work out neatly.