Dark Remains (V)
| release date | December 26 2006 |
| studio | Monarch Home Video |
| director | Brian Avenet-Bradley |
| writer | Brian Avenet-Bradley |
| starring | Cheri Christian, Greg Thompson, Scott Hodges, Jeff Lyons |
| rating | R |
| tagline | Pain never dies |
| site | darkremains.com |
| trailer 1 | Trailer #1 |
2 Comments
Creepy story about a couple that have ghosts in their rental home. Ghost and a few creepy moments, worth watching. Watch Baby Blues
I’m not sure what the BD reviewer was on when he watched this film, but don’t be fooled by his hype. This is a decent effort from a low-budget indy filmmaker with little resources, so in that it’s a success. Otherwise, this is your standard straight-to-DVD affair. Be expecting that, and this may work for you. It certainly didn’t work for me.
this movie was bad, not terrible but bad,i recommend just watching the trailer its more excitement and only 2 minutes, it had decent scares tho
There is a huge difference between SLOW and SUSPENSEFUL. Boring, boring, boring. The only cool thing in this movie was Jimmy’s belt buckle that had a knife in it.
Thumbs down!
It’s hard for me to find a good horror film that really truly scares me. I can watch fifty movies straight, all on good recommendations and not find one that really has me sitting up straight with my finger on my remote to the basement light. Waiting for the moment that causes me to press the button, then dash for the pause on my remote control. It’s often off the beaten path of bigger budget well known horror flicks and into the dredges of B-Horror and other lesser known movies where I find the rare gems that keep me awake at night. I’ll often search through forums on Bloody Disgusting and Dread Central, peruse the reviews on Netflix and Amazon searching for something that stands out amongst the truly awful. Last week I found one that fit the bill. It was called Dark Remains. The reviews on Netflix were really promising. Many claimed it was the first movie to make them really frightened in a long time. Of course they all pointed out that the acting was terrible but that the movie didn’t suffer from it. So I put it in my queue and received the movie yesterday.
I think it’s important to set the mood on how I choose to watch horror. I will never go to the theater for horror. That’s just stupid. The whole point of a good horror movie is to scare you. So how the hell is someone supposed to be scared with a theater full of annoying douchebags? I prefer to watch horror alone, in my basement, no lights, no talking.
I popped in Dark Remains and sat back. The story is simple. A husband and wife find their daughter dead in her room one night. Her wrists are slashed and there seems to be no way anyone could have gotten in. The husband is a suspect but not a likely one. To get their minds of the tragedy the couple take a retreat to a little log cabin in the woods. When they get there they of course learn that cell phones don’t work and that the land line hasn’t been hooked up. As therapy the wife takes photographs of the surrounding area and local abandoned jail (I know people this sounds like a load of trash, bear with me). The wife soon starts to see evil spirits and the ghost of her little girl. Terrible things start to happen and the mysteries of the house are revealed.
Simple, boring, used up plot we’ve seen a hundred times in bad horror. Little dead kid with grieving parents start to see ghosts and the boo scares ensue. The plot does not stand out in this movie and neither does the acting, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it atrocious. The couple played by Cheri Christian (The Signal) and Greg Thompson (Voices) do a respectable enough job with the dialogue that’s written for them, which is what I believe to be the worst thing about the film. The dialogue is so bad it almost made me want to turn the movie off. But then it happened. A ghost appeared, and lo and behold it was creepy. Not unexpected by any means, the audio clues really telegraph when the scares are coming. But the great use of makeup and fantastic movements of the dead really are spot on and take what could have been an average startle and make them full blown terrors. We get scenes that are cousins of shots in the Exorcist, but here are done differently enough that they don’t feel like blatant rip-offs and still have my skin crawling thinking of them. It’s hard to explain what is different about the moment a spirit is seen that makes it stand out from other films. There’s just something to the reveal that knocks you off guard even though it was all expected. I have to say there were at least five points in the movie that the lights went up and the movie went on hiatus as I let my nerves settle down. Movies with demons and ghosts scare me like no other because I believe in the afterlife, and in spirits. I’m not telling you that so you can send me a bible for Christmas or anything but so that you know where my threshold for this type of horror lies. I’m not scared of guys chopping people up, or killers running around with hatches because those people can be stopped. You can defend against an intruder. But a visitor from the Beyond (great movie by the way, The Beyond…. Rent it) can’t be killed and can’t be evaded.
I’m sure you want to know the technical details of the video and audio. Sorry, not here. I didn’t go to film school nor did I ever learn to tell the difference between certain light filters or film stock. I just like to enjoy movies. What I can tell you is that for such a low budget movie they really did a stellar job with the makeup and effects. There are a few computer effects sprinkled throughout the movie but it’s never distracting and never seems to be overused. The movie itself has decent look to it but the director seems to be off a little on some angles when people are talking. The man sure as hell knows how to produce a bone shilling scare though and for that I applaud. The score is minimal and used pretty effectively throughout the film. Nothing about it stands out to me one way or the other.
So what’s your deal? Do you get together with four or five of your closest friends to watch a horror movie? Do you talk during the movie and like to tell each other how badass the kill scenes are? If so, pass this up. The acting alone will have you laughing your ass off and you will miss what’s truly a diamond in the rough. If however you like the thrill of being all alone in the house with the lights off, the house silent and the only sound coming from your speakers than you will not be let down by Dark Remains. Rent it and be ready for some genuine scares.
Aside from a couple of genuinely creepy scenes and pretty good jump scares, this movie is not deserving of it’s BD review.
The acting is pretty bad all around, especially from the female lead. She has the emotional range of a shoe.
I found the plot to be confusing in places, but it doesn’t matter since it wasn’t all the interesting to begin with.
And the movie consists of maybe 3,000 jump scares and 2,995 of them are pretty generic. Yes, I jumped more than a few times during this film, but that doesn’t equal actually scared. Loud fucking music suddenly turned up all the way to 11 from being on 1 with something popping up on screen would make anyone jump and it doesn’t take talent to do that.
Overall this movie is pretty average. The few creepy jump scares that are good save this film from me giving it a lower score.
2 and a half skulls out of 5
Some moments of terrible acting, for sure, but there are some very good scares in this as well. It may be low budget B fare, but the director knew how to develop a suprisingly chilling atmosphere and get the most out of what he had—-which wasn’t much at all, so all the more impressive. No horror awards here, but I enjoyed watching it.
This had some really bad acting and obviously the budget was very small, but this movie had some great jump moments, probably the most of any movie I have ever seen, I have have seen alot, for that I’ve got to give it an A for effort, or a 5 out of 5
Most ultra low-budget straight to DVD films can be considered “dark remains” and belong in the bowl.
This one’s above the rim…
After their daughter is brutally murdered in thier home a grieving young couple escapes the city to find solace in the mountains. They try to stay busy but find their tattered relationship strained by their guilt over their daughters death.
Imagine putting your young daughter to bed and waking later that night, only to find her slashed to death by a knife in the very bed she slept. Young Emma’s parents are distraught and suffering from terrible grief. They decide to move to a cabin in the mountains – a chance to heal and start anew. Julie (Cheri Christian), her mom, is becoming more and more depressed and withdrawn. Unfortunately for her, this mountaintop is riddled with the restless spirits of the dead, and they are drawn to her suffering like magnets.
This aint Lars von Trist’s Antichrist – its a 2006 ghost story, done on a low budget scale by a new shot-in-the-dark director named Brian Avenet-Bradley. Dark Remains is one of those films that transcends what you would normally expect from its budget. It actually made me jump – like the first solid twitch of an epileptic seizure at one point – which I didn’t think was possible to do anymore with a sub-mill’ Amazonian.
The plot is dark. Nobody smiles in this film. From the onset you’re shown two suicides, and then the murder of an innocent little girl as she laid sleeping in her bed. From there her parents are followed up to the mountains where they retreat to the seclusion of a cabin, where, understandably within the context of this plot, there are a lot more serious and sad faces. In an effort to regain a thirst for life through her photography, husband Allen (Greg Thompson) hands Julie a camera before her first walk in the forest. The trail just beyond the woods takes her to a local abandoned prison, where disgruntled ghosts pose for pictures, and unknowingly, notice and follow her home. Its nearly that spectral time of year to strike the mountain, as restless spirits have been doing for years circa the latter part of May.
Inside the house the hauntings begin, as the spirits of those who have died on this mountain begin to hang in the shower, lurk in the reflection of bathroom mirrors, peer through windows, and spidercrawl down the stairs like Regan in the 2000 Exorcist release. This backslider looks a lot like Cheryl from Evil Dead – and although these haunting techniques are not out of the ordinary, Avenet-Bradley shoots them in such a way that has them appearing in moments that you’d least expect. He uses several shots over and over, most of which pack no scare, and then when you’re expecting nothing, BAM. Its rare and far between that you will see an amateur horror film with such an unusually keen sense of timing.
The blood and violence isn’t the traumatic factor. There are slit wrists, implied gunshots to the head (you know, the barrel in the mouth and the splash against the wall), bludgeonings and stabbings – but nothing that will make genre fans especially squeamish. Its the ghosts, man. The one that appears when the friends are over popped me out of my seat, and I had to laugh because it got me. Chances are it will get you too.
Ghost stories are a dime a dozen. If you dug American Haunting, Fragile, and Gravedancers, this low budget standout has no problem hanging with the pack, as Dark Remains arms itself with a couple of genuine moments that’ll make you jump like youre having a cadaveric spasm. The story gets slightly thinned out towards the end, and you will have to endure your share of low budget imperfection, but supporting actor Scott Hodges does a great job re-sparking attention playing the disturbed neighbor Jim Paynem, and overall, you get more than you would expect from something else of this quality.
Lars von Trier, I meant