I had planned to watch a documentary about werewolves for review today. The link to the screener didn't work and so I had the pleasure of instead choosing something of my own to watch. I decided to watch my DVD of Robert David Sanders creature feature horror, The Blackout (to date the only film the man has ever directed). This is not a good movie, in fact it is so bad at times that I couldn't stop myself laughing out loud. That is actually its saving grace, as this had the pleasure of being so bad it became good.
It takes place in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, a city that has been experiencing increasingly regular earthquakes for long enough that the residents are no longer that fazed by them. While fetching some Christmas presents that his parents (Barbara Streifel Sanders and Joseph Dunn) have confusingly left in the basement of the apartment building they live in, a young boy encounters something monstrous. Soon, the guests at a party, as well as the parents of the boy (whose daughter has also managed to go missing), find themselves under attack by hideous creatures from below the earth. With it being too dangerous to stay in the building (especially due to a power outage plunging the place into darkness), the survivors group together to first find the missing children of the parents, and then escape the building.
Around 95% of the special effects here are computer generated, and boy do they look terrible. Being a film from the early 2000s it can be forgivable for how bad they look, but the effects are bad enough that they look almost cartoon like. They are used everywhere, from kills, to the stingers on the humanoid scorpion creatures, to elevator shafts, and even exterior shots of the apartment building, and they never once fail to look comically bad. The few times practical effects were used the film actually transcended itself slightly, but time and time again what should be an impressive scene is ruined by the laughably fake looking effects and images.
There is a high body count and mercifully not all of these are death by CG stinger. The stinger is put to fun use, such as decapitation and several victims have it punched through their entire body. The creature design was actually pretty decent, ignore the artificial looking stingers floating around and they look good. As I said before, they resemble humanoid scorpions, with a little bit of ant thrown in, as well as some CG blind eyes (of course looking bad).
There was some issues I had with the plot, namely one character who managed to impressively warp from the basement of the building, to an elevator in a disused elevator shaft at the very top, with no indication how on earth they managed to do that. Characters are a mix of super irritating and super dumb. I loved the beefy guy with the gun who manages to kill exactly zero of the monsters despite constantly unloading his gun at close range in their general direction. I initially thought that perhaps the monsters were bullet proof, but later they are shown to easily be killed with a single shot (he must have had a terrible aim!). I did genuinely like Freddy (Anthony Tedesco - Adr1ft video game voice work), a comedy character, he was an agoraphobic nerd who was very resourceful. The one purposely funny moment in the movie had him handing his colleague a tiny torch about the size of the pencil, before he himself pulls out a ridiculously huge torch for himself that is so big he has to hold it with two hands! In general the acting was atrocious, Tedesco was decent, and the actor playing the little girl was surprisingly good, but every other actor was amusingly terrible.
It was slightly odd that only three groups of people appear to live in the entire apartment block, I assumed the rest of the tenants were hiding in their apartments maybe? Will give the writer the benefit of the doubt with that one.
The Blackout is an awful horror film, yet it has some impressive dedication to providing huge big budget moments in a low budget film. There were some aspects of this that I thought were actually decent. I loved the ending to the film, I thought the creature design was strong, and while the story was traditional, I liked the high body count and some unexpectedly darker moments. At times this did feel muddled however, having it take place on Christmas Eve was pointless, there are some giant plot holes, and those special effects really did overreach the capabilities of the budget. A low scoring film, but I would be lying if I said I hadn't found this dumb horror to be entertaining.
SCORE:
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