Review: Julian Richards’ Darklands

6th December 2012

Julian Richards’ movie Darklands was first released in the UK already in 1997 and has since then been shown at many festivals around Europe and won quite a few prizes prizes, including Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Silver, Best Screenplay and Best Independent Feature Award. But this year, 2012, “Darklands“ will go on its second round as it is finally going to be released on DVD in Canada and the United States. So we will see pretty soon what the Americans and Canadians think of this Welsh homegrown low budget horror movie.

The story is about a journalist Frazer Truick (Craig Fairbass) who meets a beautiful trainee journalist Rachael Morris ( Rowena King). She gets him to investigate the death of her brother, who on a closer look was actually murdered by the religious cult in the town. Soon he realizes that the woman who he sleeps with already in the first thirty minutes of the movie isn’t very trustworthy at all and has some secrets herself. There are a lot of bad guys in this story and one good guy who has to figure out everything on his own. Will he make it or is he going to be the next human sacrifice of the cult ?

This Welsh horror movie is not really that scary at all. It just has a few disgusting killing scenes (I don’t suggest a vegetarian to watch this movie unless you enjoy looking at a pig being slaughtered while it is screaming horribly). For me, Darklands didn’t offer anything new that I haven’t seen in movies before, but then again, I’m not really into fantasy anyway.

There were a few good twists to the movie that I didn’t exactly expect to see, for example the ending. And there is nothing wrong with the plot – a story of a religious cult doing some bizarre sacrifices can be quite horrifying indeed. But there was something missing in this film, that something what would make it stand out from the other similar movies. Darklands includes all the elements a fantasy horror movie should have but nothing more that would take it to the next level and make you want to say „ Ooh, this is brilliant,“ and hold onto your seat while watching it.

Overall, I think Darklands is a nice movie to watch when you aren’t really looking for anything special. The movie isn’t bad, it isn’t great, I’d say the film is a totally average 90’s horror movie, except it doesn’t have any running half-naked teenagers running away from some killer with a mask. Instead it has a one man trying to find the truth among all the other bad men who are so desperately against him. Of course, if you like these „ one man tries to save all“ movies and don’t mind a little killing every now and then, you might find this one an amazing movie. But if you want to watch something what would really be something scary and make you feel fear, Darklands is not for you.

Shortly said, it was like playing games at school with your teacher. You get very excited that you don’t have to do any schoolwork anymore and then the game the teacher wants to play includes you doing math every minute in order to find out something super „interesting“ in history. Which can be even worse than the schoolwork itself. Same with this „horror“ movie .. it’s just a film that includes some killing, there is absolutely nothing scary about it.

Darklands was Julian Richards’ feature movie debut and although I don’t find the film amazing, I still got to give him some credit for it. I mean, it’s not a bad movie, I managed to watch it till the end without falling asleep and found some twists quite interesting but that was all there was…

After Darklands, Richards has continued on doing horror movies such as The Last Horror Movie(2003), Summer Scars (2007) and has always won awards or at least been nominated so you can see the guy obviously has some talent. Shiver (2012) is coming out next year in America.

Well, Darklands DVD just came out in US and Canada in the end of November and the movie might be on its second round of success. Or maybe not.

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