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Days of Darkness
By Geoff Bough
While not a complete failure of a film, Jake Kennedy’s Days of Darkness
suffers on multiple key elements. The beginning of the movie seems quite
rushed as we see a comet barreling towards Earth which we later learn
spreads an infectious, parasitic alien dust upon impact.
Steve and Mimi (Travis Brorsen, Roshelle Pattison) are having a romantic moment in the wilderness and as they leave, they are met with a stumbling “zombie”. Steve is bitten in the initial physical exchange with the zombie. I use the term ‘zombie’ loosely in this review.
The two are rescued by a man named Simon who tells them to follow him and proceeds to lead the couple to a fenced in shelter, which is an abandoned NORAD microwave tower. Once at the base, the plot begins to take a dive as the group of survivors are a bunch of clichéd characters with typical dispositions. We have Chad - the standoffish survivalist, Trent – the evangelical psychopath, Slasher – the blue collar salesman, Dj – the strong-armed African American, Lin – the strong-willed feminist, Simon – the brainy gay guy, Kylie – the dimwitted porn star and Kylie’s daughter Jane – the anti-social teenager. It’s the often used character mix for this type of film and just comes off as a kind of gimmicky and forced.
Once the group learns that Steve has been bitten, they banish him at Chad’s behest to a room with ‘Herbert’, the infected brother of one of the survivors in a scene slightly reminiscent of 28 Days Later. Here’s where this film completely lost my attention…Steve gets some kind of inclination to poke at Herbert’s groin and we see something bloody fall to the floor which Steve picks up… upon further inspection, we learn that the alien dust causes male victim’s genitals to fall off which is then replaced with a parasitic testicle-sack that breeds little pink sea-monkey looking things, which later become much bigger pink sea-monkey things that leap around and kill people.
I’ll give the effects team credit here, the parasites are kind of interesting looking but for me, they just don’t work in this capacity. We also learn that virgin women have some kind of spontaneous alien impregnation and develop a weird gray vein on the back of their necks which seem to act as a feeding tube for the parasitic embryo.
After the traditional killing off of various secondary characters, Steve has some sort of epiphany and realizes that the parasites are allergic to alcohol. He applies his theory to Mimi who upon imbibing the alcohol aborts her parasitic infant. The lone surviving couple then goes on a shotgun rampage and blasts all of the aliens? …zombies? …parasites? Anyways…they blast the horde of things massing outside the fence and we are then treated to the credits of the film.
Days of Darkness tries to put a new spin on the subgenre but seems to fall short of its intentions. Instead of creating an eerie apocalyptic zombie film, it is lost in quirky plot points, spotty dialogue, parasitic testes and spontaneous virgin birth.
The film is more akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Slither than it is to any zombie film. Sometimes the vagueness of what creates a ‘zombie’ really adds to the creepiness of the film. Instead of this obscurity, we are given the tell by way of the aforementioned parasitic sack. The film does have some interesting creature effects which if applied to actually creating some zombies, could have garnered some more points with me. It’s worth having a case of beer and some laughs but for the more hardcore zombie fan, unfortunately I can’t recommend Days of Darkness.