Nightworld (2017)

Former LA cop Brett (Jason London) has great difficulty working through the death of his Bulgarian wife Ana (Diana Lyubenova), spending his time at their Bulgarian country home in a deep depression. A concerned buddy has a plan to get him out and back into the world, to which end the proactive man has procured a security job in Sofia for Brett.

It’s a live-in position in an old villa whose upper levels have been converted into apartments, or so the owners of the place say. Not that Brett’s ever seeing anyone living there. It’s a cushy, if somewhat strange job: Brett’s only duties are locking and unlocking the main door and to descend into the very deep cellar twice a day to check some security monitors that are facing the darkness inside a large locked chamber (the film calls it a hangar, for some reason) that’s situated behind a large door with neat skulls and tentacles on it. Clearly, there’s nothing to worry about here, and at first, Brett actually seems to get better doing very little. He’s got a new environment to explore, he’s got at least something to occupy himself with, and the – very young and very very pretty – barista Zara (Lorina Kamburova) of the corner coffee shop clearly has an eye on him. Therea are certainly worse ways to live.

However, there’s something really strange going on in the villa. There are not just the expected peculiar noises, and that hell gate style door in the cellar, but Brett also begins to have nightmares that begin to turn into daytime visions. And once Brett has seen what looks a lot like footprints through one of his cameras and calls in the owners’ expert for this situation, an older blind man named Jacob (Robert Englund) events spiral downwards rather quickly.

For my tastes, Patricio Valladares’s Nightworld is a pleasant surprise, a horror film that feels very much beholden to the classic Weird Tales style of horror with a smidgen of Lucio Fulci I’m not going to spoil. It is, in other worlds, exactly the sort of film where I’m perfectly willing to overlook certain weaknesses as long as it understands and uses its strengths.

The obvious weakness here is the pacing; while this sort of mood based horror does need and deserve a thoughtful pace, Nightworld does meander a bit in the middle, with perhaps one dream sequence and ten minutes of running time that could productively have been excised. It’s not a deadly flaw, at least in my eyes, mind you, though it is something which will make the film not terribly interesting to watch for some viewers. The film’s not always all that believable, either: would a guy like Brett really take a job like this without at least explicitly asking if he’s guarding anything illegal and without any explanation for its strangeness? The May-October romance between Brett and Zara isn’t terribly easy to buy either.


However, while acknowledging these flaws, I can’t say they really did anything to my enjoyment of the film. Valladares – ably assisted by some cracking spooky locations and Pau Mirabet’s moody and shadowy camera work – creates a wonderful sense of creeping wrongness. And once the film has explained the rather wonderful backstory of the villa through some patented and effective Englund exposition, it also develops a neat and effective resonance with classical myths about the realms of the dead, all the while making good use of its budget (the way the film uses a large, dark empty room to full effect borders on brilliance) and evoking its lead’s pining for a lost love to thematically appropriate effect. In general, Valladares uses iconic horror images very well, with moments like the shots of the faces of the dead trapped in the villa pressed against its windows from the inside just resonating very well with me in their archetypal feel.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Zombie Shark (2015)

Sisters Amber (Cassie Steele) and Sophie Steele (Sloane Coe), Ambers’s boyfriend Jenner (Ross Britz) and the sisters’ kinda-sorta friend Bridgette (Becky Andrews) are going on a weekend trip to a rather disappointing island.

Little did (or indeed could) they expect the place would soon be under attack by a shark zombie quite Jaws-ily called Bruce who does what zombies do: multiply. Bruce is the product of a tiny research lab right around the corner where one Dr. Palmer (Laura Cayouette) attempted to create useful cell regeneration properties, with sharks as the oh so obvious stand-ins for future humans. On the plus side, once the zombie sharks really attack, and people just can’t stay away from the water, Palmer’s security guy Maxwell Cage (Jason London, looking confused and rather constipated) comes in handy. Though it has to be said that Amber and Sophie are pretty handy in needless zombie fights themselves.

Sharks again, SyFy? I know, I know, sharks are to the SyFy Original movie like gorillas to Julius Schwartz edited DC comics but now that the Channel has started its misguided attempt to become “serious” again and they only crap out a handful of these films in a year, I wish less than two thirds of these were about sharks.

Particularly since the people responsible for the special effects still can’t make a believable (or just effective) CGI shark to save their lives, leaving the film’s central threat rather toothless. Not that the human zombie make-up later on (spoiler, I guess) is much better than the shark effects but then, why bother when the film has much worse problems in its so-called script. It is, for example, utterly unclear why most of the cast is taking the monsters on at all instead of just sitting somewhere, waiting. Sure, sure, there’s that one scene where a shark attacks on land, and Amber (as a waitress clearly a zombie shark logic expert) suggests that these things are as dangerous on land as in the sea, but last time I looked, and zombie shark or not, sharks aren’t terrible well adapted to moving about on land what with them being built for swimming.

Most of the film is pretty much SyFy Original shark stuff by the numbers: the cast really is one of the lesser ones, with London the best they could do with actors having hit on hard times (which is to say, not much at all), and the young actresses mostly droning their dialogue with little visible interest. Well, Steele is putting some effort in, but the film’s particularly meandering and cloying application of SyFy character background melodrama standards doesn’t exactly help her much.

On the plus side, director Misty Talley does pace the film well, and the script does contain at least one and a half surprises when it comes to character survival and death. I’d even call them subversive surprises if only they weren’t buried under so much of the usual dross, and the standard elements the film doesn’t resolve it doesn’t so much seem to leave unresolved because it is being clever, but because it simply can’t be bothered to put in effort.

However, as so many of these films are, Zombie Shark is a perfectly alright, undemanding watch for those days when you only have as much brain capacity as Jason London has facial expressions.

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