NIGHT (Director’s Cut) ** USA 2004 Dir: Byron C. Miller 80 mins
When Detective Mike Jericho (John Hardy) and partner Jimi Cannon (Shawn LeTang) raid a party, amidst the chaos a young woman gets shot dead yet Mike watches her get up and walk away. Plagued by visions of her he walks out of his job to go and find her. She of course finds him first and lures him away from his career and friends to join her family of blood sucking night crawlers. Jimi on the other hand is desperate to find his best friend and partner. Going up against numerous ghouls to try and find Mike he unfortunately discovers that Mike seems to be enjoying his new life.
Shot with brain aching vibrant colours and incorporating a plethora of brash, over powering New Romantic and Industrial Metal styles in the soundtrack this one is a bit of an attack on the senses. It certainly tries hard to make an impression, unfortunately in this instance, for me there is way too much going on to be able to concentrate on any one thing fully. I found the crazy colours in the visuals made everything really out of focus though some of the camera angles were edgy and interesting if rather too shaky at times. The sound was terrible, the dialogue was far too low in the mix leaving you struggling to hear what exactly was being said. The sound effects were laughable, for example ; a guy gets slammed into a wall repeatedly and it sounds like like someone is just tapping on a door. The gun shot sounds are off too but I can’t explain how or why. As mentioned the soundtrack is constant and I did quite like most of it but they probably could have reined it back a bit as it was pretty relentless. The acting was frequently off the mark as well but it did seem like they were really trying to make their characters likeable and natural but it came across more awkward then anything else. The dialogue was really rather cheesy, “sometimes you just gotta go for it” and on the odd occasion just plain weird. When greeting Mike for the first time a jittery female vamp gets up in his face and says “you like fruit? It’s really good for you. Nevermind” … errr, what??!? For a vampire movie there is little in the way of special effects save for bullet wounds and blood. The vampires don’t appear to have any fangs or anything noticeably vampish about them at all. There is quite a lot of action going on in this and it often goes from one fight straight into another which is kind of cool however they seem to be overly choreographed and slowed down, again it’s hard to pin point exactly what was wrong in these scenes you just know that it’s not right. In conclusion there were some okay points with this if you can overcome the bright but fuzzy visuals, awful sound and overall non vampire nature of this vampire movie.
Review by Sarah Budd