The box promised a supernatural war story. Well all right, I like that sort of thing!

Never trust the box.

The meaningless empty open scene is of a screaming soldier with flamethrower flaming the snowpack since the budget didn't allow for an actual fire gag with people or buildings or even a burning stick.

Not propitious opening to incite any expectation that Straight Into Darkness (2005) will take us anywhere but Straight into Boredom.

Filmed in Roumania, it's supposed to be the European western front in 1945. Military police are taking awol guys along a dirt road from nowhere to nowhere in a post-war model Jeep. Suddenly big firecrackers posing as mines cause the Jeep to get replaced by a mock Jeep set on fire. Injured soldiers begin crawling toward a tree-line through the hoky wussy mine field.

As a war film it's about the least convincing ever. It's like a bunch of guys in cheaply rented costumes making an amateur film in a donkey pasture, but without the donkeys so there's just nothing interesting.

Two survivors of the mine field are the awol guys -- one bad, the other dull. They run through the woods for no reason other than to wear themselves out. When they get below the snowline, they slow down just walk around for about ten minutes.

Since a supernatural tale was what the box promised, I kept sticking it out, hoping to see, oh, I dunno, a vampire nazi perhaps, or zombie grunts.

The awol guys camp in a bombed out church with a screaming priest they had to tie up to keep him quiet. Everybody's attempts at acting are painful to observe, when not pitiable.

When they leave the church the priest follows them, at first from a distance. He can't speak intelligibly, but they let him tag along as they wander on without map or direction in mind.

It's once again a hell of a long walk in the woods to pad this turkey out to feature length. On their walk they have very few encounters of any kind & even the crazy priest gets written out the story without having served any purpose.

They're captured by French civillians: a man, woman, & several children. The children are odd, as though from a hospital orphanage. Odd children lend the film something it needed much, much earlier, colorful content.

Nazi infantry arrives to do battle with the ten special needs children trained as soldiers to stand against warriors of the Reich.

The idea of mentally retarded, crippled, & mentally ill children fighting the nazies with a couple Americans who went awol might've made for a good story, & it might affect some viewers just because bad stuff having to puppies or children is tough stuff even if they have no personality or names.

In the hands of, oh, an early cinema verite director from France or somewhere where people knew how it'd actually feel to be in this mess, well, it could've been a great film. From Ohio's trite shlockmeister Jeff Burr you can get only junk, despite that this is an independent production rather than Burr's usual junk-contract.

You can sort of tell he wanted to make a good movie. Nothing in his filmmaking background (sixteen shlockers preceed this one) prepared him to make a good film. By using the same cost-cutting tricks he used to make crummy shlockers -- including cutting corners on talent -- he succeeded primarily at fulfilling the garbage in, garbage out prophesy.

A suggestion of reincarnation arises when the grunts find out the basement is full of looted paintings, which is what the nazi soldiers have really come to get. One of the paintings depicts the awol soldiers together with one of the special needs children (the masked girl).

It seems we're in magic realist territory rather than heading for something legitimately supernatural. That could be spiffy if it were at all developed, but it's dropped about as quickly as its introduced.

Straight into Darkness has maybe six images that come off well, including the girl's Carnival of Souls mask, & the heroic death of the legless boy. These second-long moments of effectiveness are buried in a whelter of bad writing, bad staging, bad acting, & general nonsense.

As the final scene approaches, I'd lost interest in everything & everyone except the mumbling masked girl who I did still hope to see take her mask off. It all gets slightly better in the last third but the whole film has only twenty minutes of content, & some of the worst patience-testing padding of all time is in that "improved" last half hour.

In lieu of a climax it has a semi-poetic coda. That coda rather succeeds if you're at all forgiving, or prone to weeping at the cinema. But it needed a climax in addition. It needed the children to be more than a miscellany of Rainman extras, but to have names & personalities & stories of their own, instead of all that contentless walking & walking. It needed way better adult actors. And the script needed serious rewrites until it began to tell an actual story.

My suspicion is that the title is revised from Conrad & the walking & walking & walking issupposed to be the same as the river journey in Heart of Darkness. That sort of slow pacing can work but we still needed the children to become characters rather than decorations. The film's endless faults might've slipped past without ruining it if the special needs children had been developed as real players in a real story.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl