Darkest Hour: It felt more like three

The other day, I noticed the horror/sci-fi (yes, in this case I eschew the industry accepted "SF") movie Darkest Hour was available on Vudu. It had received horrible reviews, but I've either become something of a connoisseur of bad movies or it's a really bad addiction that calls for an intervention.

I convinced my daughter we should watch it, so within a few clicks of the remote, we had the movie filling our big screen TV in all its HD glory.

The premise of the movie is simple: Alien beings of electrical energy have landed on Earth, and they like to eat us. Or something. People mostly just disintegrate, always leaving behind a shoe (I'm pretty sure it's always the left shoe) or a gun or something. You can't really see the aliens during the day except as swirling winds. Their arrival is always heralded by the flickering of lamps and a dull rumbling of dramatic music. And people are always shooting bullets at them even though it is made glaringly obvious in the film's early moments that they're bullet proof.

Horror movies with dramatic music tracks are always great. "Hide, you idiot! Can't you hear the dramatic music?! The killer is coming!" My kids are always worried about sharks when we go to the beach. I always tell them not to worry until you hear the da-duh, da-duh ...

The lamp just flickered! They're here! Quick, hide behind a transparent pane of glass!

Yes, I kid you not: The aliens cannot "see" through glass. My daughter and I decided that mankind needed to create armor made entirely out of glass.

And throwing stones would be made a capital offense.

Darkest Hour is one of those movies with entirely unlikable main characters. You can't help but actually want to see these people get disintegrated. I'm pretty sure the whole movie came about after someone messing around with digital effects discovered a really neat-o keen way of making it look like things are getting reduced to ash and sucked into an invisible void. What can we do with this? I know--we'll make a movie about aliens that disintegrate things! Awesome! What will they look like? It will take too much time and money to create digital aliens or to find extras to run around in badly designed suits, so we'll just make them invisible. Brilliant!


Then the aliens conspire to use the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator to blow up the Earth. Oh, wait. That was a different story entirely. And, arguably, a better one.

I confess we did not watch the whole film. Often it's fun to watch bad movies because they can be hilariously, entertainingly bad. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Darkest Hour. It's uninteresting, unimaginative and just not funny at being bad.

Sigh.