disc rating:
company: Bantam Street
year: 2009
runtime: 93′
director: Larry Blamire
cast: Jim Beaver, Jennifer Blaire,
Larry Blamire, Brian Howe,
Dan Conroy, Robert Deveau,
Bruce French, Betty Garrett
writer: Larry Blamire
cinematography: Anthony J. Rickert-Epstein
music: Christopher Caliendo
Reviewed from a screener provided
by Shout! Factory, LLC.
Order this film from Amazon.com
Dark and Stormy Night made its DVD premiere on the 17th of August courtesy of Shout! Factory, and can currently be ordered through Amazon.com and other online retailers.
Plot: A motley assortment of people converge on an old mansion to hear the reading of a will, only to be murdered one by one by an unseen assailant.
Ah, Larry Blamire strikes again. In the interest of full disclosure I’m no fan of the writer / director / actor, and my only other experience with his work (The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, released on DVD day and date with this) left me utterly underwhelmed and even a little pissed that I had expended the minimum of effort required to screen it. Dark and Stormy Night improves slightly upon that picture, if only because it never devolves into a protracted and clumsy back and forth over double negatives, but that’s faint praise indeed.
Looking to make a send-up of the old dark house pictures that dominated the horror scene of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Blamire instead crafts a broad attack on mystery thrillers in general that plays more like a boring and burdensome attempt at live action Clue than satire. The characters are the expected caricatures – a big game hunter, house keepers, good-for-nothing relatives with weasely mustaches. The majority of the film is spent on lengthy one-take setups in which each and every performer (and there are many) is crammed on screen at once. I was thankful when the lights finally flickered and the first thunk of a body was heard, gleefully announcing to me that there was one less obnoxious character for me to keep track of.
Performances are about what I expected given the earlier experience of The Lost Skeleton Returns Again – wink-wink, nudge-nudge awfulness perpetrated by a cast with neither the conviction or talent to make even the few decent jokes turn a laugh. Particularly irksome is Brian Howe, who spends the entirety of his screen time uncomfortably scrunching his face and spewing forth his best Charles Laughton. Only icon Bob Burns escapes unembarrassed, via a brief walk-through cameo as a gorilla.
Once again it’s Blamire’s insipid scripting and limp direction that really let things down. Dialogue is clunky and void of pacing, inherent or otherwise, and confuses monolithic gobs of stupidity for cleverness and wit throughout. Plodding, elephantine direction is the final nail in the coffin – may it rest in peace, amen.
I suppose that Blamire may be on to something in this post-MST3K age, and genre satires can and have been done with riotously enjoyable results (the recent Black Dynamite for example), but he just doesn’t seem to have it in him to make anything an ounce as entertaining as what he seeks to emulate. Bad can be funny, Larry, but more often than not it’s just bad, and Dark and Stormy Night does nothing to get you any closer to the former.
Shout! Factory wraps Larry Blamire’s latest turnip in fancy paper, coming through again with an excellent release of a feature that really doesn’t deserve it. Dark and Stormy Night is presented in two flavors, black and white and color, both in anamorphic and progressive 1.78:1 transfers. The shot-on-video production looks strong enough, from a strictly technical standpoint, presenting with decent detail and healthy contrast. Damage is expectedly absent, and a few issues with video aliasing (a byproduct of the shooting medium) aren’t overly distracting. I can’t imagine this one ever looking better and can’t think of anyone who would rightly want it to. The image is supported by 2.0 stereo audio that works just fine. There are no subtitles.
Supplements start off with a feature commentary track that is, as was the case with The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, quite a bit more fun that the film it accompanies. Blamire joins Jennifer Blaire, Brian Howe, Daniel Roebuck, Alison Martin, Trish Geiger and Dan Conroy for the proceedings. Next up is a 20 minute ‘Making Of…’, mostly an interview with writer / director / actor Blamire interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage featuring other involved parties. Rounding things out is an 8 and a half minute ‘gag reel’. The packaging and menu design are of Shout!’s usually high standards, though the main menu does recycle the same canned thunder effect over and over and over again to rather irritating effect.
Those who count themselves among the members of the steadily growing cult of Blamire won’t want to miss Shout!’s excellent disc. I’ve no real complaints to levy against it, which is as close to a recommendation as the rest of you are going to get.
