User Reviews

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*

Sometimes, souls get missed. Sometimes, we have to send intergalactic bounty hunters to search for them. Sometimes, we must send them on very dangerous missions. "Darkhunters" sends these men of action into the thick of battle to search for the movie. The mission was too perilous. The Darkhunter failed.

"Darkhunters" starts off with an interesting concept and then refuses to do anything with it. So souls get lost on the way to heaven. A hot chick is the only one who can identify them. An alien Darkhunter stops by to harass her. He speaks in an alien tongue but the filmmakers were kind enough to subtitle his gibberish. Then the movie drags on and on until it somehow mercifully ends.

There was an interesting movie here somewhere but the Darkhunter couldn't find it. Next time, leave it in the hands of the hot chick. They always know what to do.

This is truly one of the most awful movies of all time. It's dull, ponderous, badly acted, and teeth crawlingly pretentious.

I watched for about an hour waiting for some kind of drama to unfold, before realising there wasn't any. The shot on a shoe string budget was particularly painful. These have to be the worst day for night shots since Plan Nine from Outer Space.

The only barely redeeming feature is the ludicrous 'demons' wandering around the countryside with a plastic cat basket. How scary is that? And I did like the moggys used as extras, I suppose they are least cheap. Though it did seem a bit obvious that they had been enticed into camera by the careful placement of some tuna.

This film is so dreadful, it should have a public health warning. There was a queue at my local video store when I took it back, of people demanding their money back. I kid you not!

This film is a case of being able to perfectly judge a book by its cover. The opening credits say this film is "Johannes Roberts's Darkhunters". Yes. Roberts's, not Roberts'. That no one involved with this movie, including writer/director Johannes Roberts, was smart or just attentive enough to catch that punctuation mistake says it all. Darkhunters is delightfully bad.

The suckitude begins almost at once as the story lapses into a flashback after the opening scene, but then goes into a flashback within that flashback. I t doesn't stop there, however, as there are repeated flashbacks within the flashback within the flashback. After briefly introducing us to the main character, the story then focuses on a completely different and seemingly unrelated person for the next 15 minutes. I thought there'd been some sort of editing problem and another film got spliced into this one by mistake. The plot is also dominated by three of the longest and worst conversations you'll ever see in any motion picture. One is so confusing you'd need a Venn Diagram to understand what's being said, another feels like a maze where writer/director Roberts got lost inside his own script and couldn't find a way out. As for the third…well, you know those scenes where two people are face to face while the camera spins around them? That's how the third conversation is filmed, except the camera keeps spinning around them for two and a half minutes. I'm not sarcastically exaggerating. I actually timed it out.

But, wait! It gets worse. About a third of this movie is nothing more that slo-mo images of feline frolicking, like a complimentary DVD you get for subscribing to Cat Fancy magazine. Then there's a scene in a dog pound that resembles a TV commercial from the Humane Society. Lead actress Susan Paterno is so awful, they would have been better off casting college football coach Joe Paterno in drag. Lead actor Dominique Pinon looks like a little person somehow blown up to regular size. In one of the most inexplicable career decisions of all time, legitimate Hollywood actor Jeff Fahey shows up as a demon in dire need of lip balm and a manicure. Another demon shows up that speaks in an unintelligible garble, but is given subtitles that make him sound like a slightly peeved accountant.

I could go on and on about all the absurdly terrible things in this motion picture. What amplifies the crap factor into "so bad it's good" territory is that so many of those absurdly terrible things are repeated over and over again, making it crystal clear that no one involved with this production knew their ass from their elbow. If you and your friends tried to turn Darkhunters into a drinking game, they'd find you all dead the next day from alcohol poisoning.

The story itself is basically the secret origin of Carol Miller (Susan Paterno), a woman chosen by God to kill ghosts by shooting them in the chest with bullets. They are ghosts who have been forgotten about through some sort of divine administrative mistake, ghosts who are invisible to the naked eye yet have enough physical substance to do things like drive cars. Miller has to track down these ghosts and shoot them before demons show up to claim their souls for some sort of supernatural black market. And yes, when the ghosts are shot, they bleed and fall to the floor like corpses.

Johannes Roberts's Darkhunters is one of the most awesomely, hilariously bad things I've ever seen. If that's what you're in the mood for, there isn't a much better example of it than this movie.

Hm. Where do I start? I usually ignore whatever rating IMDb has when looking up a movie because I think I might like it anyway or whatever and I should at least give it a chance, but this time I wish I'd paid attention.

I know some people liked it, and I'm not trying to say that they shouldn't. It was semi-amusing at some parts. But if you're like me and you don't like watching cats prancing around in the undergrowth for 20 minutes, random fast motion cloud scenes, dogs barking in cages for another 20 minutes set to 'thrilling' music, and close-ups of faces while people are speaking, then you might want to avoid this movie. The actors were either positively wooden or way over the top, and the film quality was awful, fuzzy and grainy and bland and not in an artistic way at all. And I know that we were supposed to think that Carol was not just a crazy maniac with a gun shooting innocent people with this weird religious psychosis going on, but... well, she doesn't really convince me otherwise. In fact, I ended up really disliking her crazy character. And what was up with the souls in space? I understand this is a fantasy movie, but come on.

I will say, the angel at the end was freaking creepy. It was the creepiest thing in the whole movie, WAY more creepy than the Darth Maul lava-face demon. I give them props for that scene, it was good. But not good enough to actually see the movie. And the opening credits were great, but don't be fooled! I would've rather they used whatever money went into those credits to make the movie better.

Bah. I wish I hadn't bought this for even the $2 that I paid for it, I could have bought a candy bar instead. :/

OK the box look interesting, the opening have great music and its kinda original, to that its all OK. But when the movie start...well its not my first videoville movie, i watched Ghost Lake, and its very similar of this movie except its ever worse here. The story at first sounded interesting but the whole movie look like a movie shot by a bunch of university student, with specials effect that me laugh, the blood look like a mix of red and white paint, the fire effect on the demon face look like it was done with a program i could buy at my local computer shop. All the movie is shot in day(very great for a movie supposed to be horror) and there like no gore(1 scene only and it look so home-made and not credible) and near no blood(it can be considered a great thing considering the look of the blood show) and 1 demon for the whole movie. The story is going nowhere , it give you the impression that it never start, there so much useless scene done only to give the movie the average duration time(when the demon search the guy in the dogs thing for about 4 minutes...) Way too much slow-mo things. Well lets just say this movie is a Z-series one and a very poor one. All cool idea lost themselves and you get a cheesy movie. It bored my all long and I'm not the guy who get bored very easily with horror movie, man i even like house of the dead and alone in the dark from Uwe Boll and you probably know the name for being one of the worst director but here it look too much like some guys wanting to make a movie for fun. Plus for us french speaker(tough i understand English i prefer to watch movie in my native language) there the usual videoville bad translation. In normal movie you can barely see its not the actor speaking(you have to check on lips etc) here you just have to listen to it and you know it. Very cheesy

Spoilers

I'm going to be as kind as I can about this film (some people, including directors!, can get quite upset when reviewers speak their mind) so...

There is a nice car accident and the opening credits look good and... that's it; everything else bites the big one. All the acting is appalling, the script is embarrassing, the special effects look like they were done by school children on cheap computers. All in all this film has serious bowling shoe tendencies.

As a horror film it's not very scary and if it supposed to a "thinking man's" horror film well it succeeded on some level, I kept thinking that the end of this film is an awfully long way away. It may actually be an ironic look at bad horror films and I'm missing the point but I somehow doubt it.

This is a complete car phone warehouse of a film and I could not recommend it to anyone, and it does pain me to say this as I eagerly await the resurrection of British Horror.

If you don't agree with this review, that fine, it's just my own opinion, and I'm sure someone out there will love it (the director's Mum for instance).

Where on earth do I start with the mess that is Darkhunters? Firstly the script is one of the worst to ever find its way onto a cinema or TV screen and can only be described as a poorly judged Stephen King rip-off. At one point the supposedly fearsome darkhunter Jack claims that Carol, the girl who is helping the man he is pursuing, is as annoying as "a gherkin in a burger". I would be laughing if I was making it up-BUT I'M NOT! Just as ludicrous is how Carol originally came to have the power to see how people die. A cat gave it to her when she was holding it during an auto accident she had as a kid. WHAT????????

Secondly, for a horror movie, it has no sense of tension or threat whatsoever. This may not be helped by the fact that all the action happens during stark, broad daylight. Not very atmospheric at all.

Thirdly the acting is truly awful, Pinion proves again that he needs to be speaking in his native tongue to be even remotely believable. Jeff Fahey is obviously on auto-pilot but how can blame him as he runs through a woe-ful Humphry Bogart impersonation as Barlow (Marlowe-Barlow? We get the joke it just isn't funny). Credit should go to Susan Paterno, an actress I was not aware of, she does her best with the awful part she has and puts the other, more experienced actors to shame.

At no point is it even explained how the HUMAN character can understand what Van Husen's character is saying to her. She obviously has some sort of degree in screwy alien languages.

On the plus side one moment is well done, the car crash involving Susan. The sfx are throughly believable and if it weren't for the hilarious storyline reason for this to occur it would have been applauded.

All I can say about darkhunters is that British horror will never recover from its interminable slump if movies like this continue to be made and shown. Avoid this movie like the plague, although the plague would be a lot more scary.

Darkhunters 0/5

p.s. the insinuations in other reviews that the film remains too intelligent for some are honestly hilarious. It is a weak defence when some claim "you didn't like it because you didn't understand it". The letters after my name make a fool of you not me.