A Candle in the Dark (2002)

It starts out with some guy, Luke, in what is probably supposed to be a police station, telling a story.  It's about how good-girl Sarah goes to college she finds herself being roommates with a Goth bad-girl type named Lilith.  When a string of murders plagues the campus they are living on, Sarah begins getting more and more suspicious of Lilith.  When Sarah finds pictures of her and her friends in Lilith's drawers she's afraid she's on Lilith's hit list.  Later when she recognizes a lighter that Lilith has as one that a murdered Security guard had, she begins to really get nervous about her roomy.  Sarah then has a bad dream where Lilith bites her friend Luke's neck.  Some more people turn up missing on campus and Sarah is sure that Lilith is behind it.  She turns to her friend Luke to help her out.  He takes her back to his place where he says she'll be safe.  Soon after, while she is in the bathroom, some vampire chicks show up.  Sarah comes back down to find them munching on Luke.  Then Lilith shows up and turns out to actually be a Vampire Slayer wannabe.  She shoots one vamp up, just making it jerk a few times as it slowly walks up to her and then shoots it in the head, apparently killing it.  The other vampire has Sarah in a hold, but lets her go so that she can slowly walk towards Lilith and get shot a few times.  Eventually Sarah uses a cross to get the other vampire to leave and her and Lilith run away.  There is just a short bit more of them trying to get away from vampires and the movie ends with a somewhat lame plot twist. 

This was not a good movie.  It was shot poorly and the audio in parts of it were terrible, especially the parts where Luke is being interviewed by the cops.  You can't really understand what is being said most of the time then and what you can make out is pretty lame dialog anyway.  Some of the actor’s show a bit of promise, but that is ruined by the bad writing and directing in the movie.  It's obvious that no one involved has much experience making movies of any sort.  Some of the girls in the movie are kind of cute though, so that helps.  There is some fat guy that plays a security guard that seems like he might be funny, but his acting sucks, or maybe it's just the part that was written for him sucks, in any case his part in the movie turns out being pretty lame and the main thing he has going for him are his funny looks.  There's really not much more to say about this movie.  It's just a lame Buffy rip off that doesn't come through.

This is not the worst movie I've ever seen.  In fact it's a few steps up from it.  It is however pretty bad and not likely worth your time.  Might be fun to watch with some friends who are in to bad movies, but truthfully, there are better bad movies you could spend your time watching.  I'd say this is only worth watching if you are really into one of the people acting in the movie or if you are on some sort of bad movie marathon and need something else to join the line up.  This movie is available on a couple of the box sets from Mill Creek Entertainment.  For more information check them out at http://www.millcreekent.com

1 out of 4

Reviewed by Scott Schwarzwalder

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer