Tooth and Nail

Well this was a little promising. While still mired by a silly story and a retarded plot twist, this was still a major step up from the sheer drivel that was Unearthed and Crazy Eights. While I’m now halfway through the new set of After Dark movies and have yet to find one that could at all be termed “good”, after the past couple days I’m perfectly fine with settling for “decent”.

One thing I really liked about the film was in its strict adherence to factual science. Set in the near future, the film follows a group of post-apocalyptic survivors of the collapse of human civilization after we ran out of oil to drill in 2012. Hey, it’s going to happen, and you just know that every single oil well is going to run dry all at once, if you don’t know that then you’re just blindly believing whatever Halliburton tells you, man. The beginning is pretty boring and lifeless, as it establishes the group of people (led by – I kid you not – a professor Darwin) living at a hospital, trying to somehow rebuild their lives without electricity. The film does get interesting fairly early on, though, as they are set upon by a group of cannibals, including Vinnie Jones and Michael Madsen. This may mean that I spoke too soon in declaring Crazy Eights as having the biggest star power among these movies, though in this case the star power works wonders, as both ham things up brilliantly during their all-too-brief appearances.

If there’s a flaw with the cannibals (besides the really lame plot twist that accompanies them), it’s that they are so entertaining that they only serve to further underscore how uninteresting most of the main characters are. Seriously, we even get a shot of one of them using a metal file to whittle his teeth into fangs, as though nerve endings simply do not exist in this futuristic wasteland. There’s some nice violence, and some good bits of humor here and there to boot. By the very low standards of quality this collection brings with it, it may be a borderline masterpiece. Even by regular movie standards, this will at least be something that won’t suck if you happen to catch it on TV sometime. Things are hopefully looking up here.

Rating: **