Dark Fields/Primal/Mongolian Death Worm/Virus X (2009 – 2011/eOne/IFC/Lionsgate DVDs)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C     Extras: B-/C-/D/C-     Films: C/C/C-/D

 

 

No bones about it, the horror film just doesn't pack the same punch it did 20 years or so ago.  There's just some element that the current generation of filmmakers have been unable to grab hold of.  While there has always been a bit of peeking over the shoulders of your fellow classmates in the genre, making imitation pretty commonplace, things have devolved like a playground game of telephone gone wrong - where every successive telling is further from the original idea of just what makes horror work.

 

Here we'll take a look at just a few of the problematic creations that have been made over the last few years that you'll find lurking on the shelves of your local retail juggernaut.

 

Dark Fields marks one of the final movies to be released featuring a performance from the late David Carradine.  The film has been gestating for a while now, and was previously known as “The Rain” before finding distribution.  Although the director ambitiously attempts to weave three different timelines together, it is unnecessary and makes the narrative more convoluted than it need be.  A small amount of flashbacks peppered into one main timeline would have more than sufficed, as there isn't enough weight to the tale to justify having an unwieldy structure like this.  It ends up a slow-moving and ultimately boring mess.

 

Primal is a flick from down under that falls between The Crazies and Cabin Fever in retreading the idea of something in the water turning people into unreasonable, animalistic killers. This time those affected get to sport razor sharp fangs, and there's a giant monster of some kind thrown in to boot.  Unfortunately the menace of a cute girl in hot pink capris only holds up for so long.  This is a little bit outside the norm, but that doesn't keep Primal from being just as stupid as your typical made for cable monster movie usually is.

 

Lastly, we've got two from Lionsgate, which I'd advise you to avoid like the plague.  The first of these is a SyFy Channel original movie, Mongolian Death Worm. This is a giant monster movie with a budget so low and acting so poor, others who produce like-minded junk for the channel might even blush when confronted with this clunker.  The other from the studio is Virus X, which has the appearance of being a zombie movie if judged by the looks of the cover, but is actually about several individuals infected with a mutant strain of H1N1.  Nothing really happens and no, they never mutate into anything more interesting... neither does the movie itself.

 

Picture and sound on these releases is at or below average, with Dark Fields having the best, most professional look about it.  All of the films have an anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 aspect ratio, except for Primal, which is 2.35:1.  Each film also has a 5.1 Dolby mix, and Mongolian Death Worm also features a Dolby 2.0 stereo mix.

 

As far as special features go, Mongolian Death Worm is bare-bones, but the other films do have a smattering of extras.  There's a trailer for Primal and cast interviews on Virus X. Dark Fields comes away with the most, featuring a director’s commentary track and some deleted scenes.

 

 

-   David Milchick