Rogue Cinema - Edges of Darkness (2007)

Edges of Darkness (2007) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Wednesday, October 01 @ Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

Ah the zombie movie. It's been done a million times. At least it seems like it has. The problem with that is, if you want to make a zombie movies nowadays, you have to do something different with it to make it interesting, otherwise it ends up just being more of the same, which is just boring. So did Edges of Darkness do something interesting? Actually, yeah, but there are also a few problems with it as well, which will all be covered in a minute.

Edges of Darkness is a film about a zombie infestation that's taken over the planet. Typical zombie stuff there. The zombies run around eating people and the few survivors that are left are all forced to stay locked up in their apartments and such. There are three distinct story lines going on in the film with three separate sets of people. The zombies in this film, as with a few other films I've seen like this, become secondary to everything else that's going on and are mainly used as a plot device more than anything else.

As for the three separate story lines, one revolves around a kid who's the anti-Christ who came to earth to save it from the zombie plague that god created to wipe out all life on the planet, similar to when he flooded the planet (if you believe that stuff). The second storyline revolves around a couple who are vampires and kidnap a girl to feed off of her in small amounts at a time so they can stay alive. He blood isn't sweet though, it's tainted, and she turns out to be some kind of a vampire hunter that tries to kill them both by volunteering her own blood to feed them, which she knows is tainted and will eventually kill them. The third storyline could have come right out of my freakin' life! This girl and her husband are locked up in an apartment together, and he's obsessed with his computer. She's constantly nagging him to pay attention to her because she's bored and he just ignores her. My wife and I were busting up laughing at that because it's the same crap we do to each other. Anyway, he gets this new processor for his computer that grows tentacles and attaches itself to living things to generate power for the computer, eventually attaching itself to his wife, and then finally him at the end.

One thing that was particularly amusing to me was the vampire couple. That was a pretty bizarre storyline, and by far the best of the three, but the guy in it was awesome. The vampires were a black couple, and the guy...man, he played it EXACTLY like Samuel L. Jackson would have, including all the swearing and everything else. He was awesome, and all three of them did a great job with their roles in that part of the story. The other two stories however weren't all that great or interesting. I personally would have loved it if the other two could have lived up to the quality of that one. As it is, the other two end up being just generally boring, even though there's some decent action in the anti-Christ one.

Technically the film was great. The lighting, editing, music, sound etc... were all really well done and the film was generally well paced. The zombie make up and gore effects were all great and really above and beyond your typical indie zombie film. There's really nothing to complain about with this film other than that those two story lines could have been replaced with different ones. The one with the computer guy and his wife especially seemed totally out of place in this film and would have been better suited in some kind of a sci-fi film or something. At least the vampire and anti-christ ones fit the general theme of the film. So a re-write on those, and possibly an expansion of the vampire story with an explanation about the girl and who she really was would have been in order, but even barring that, it was still a very good film and definitely one you should check out.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, you can check out the film's MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/edges_of_darkness.