Near Dark
by Kathryn Bigelow
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Adrian Pasdar, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Jenny Wright, Lance HenriksenDirector: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer: Kathryn Bigelow
Producer: Charles R. Meeker
Producer: Diane Nabatoff
Producer: Edward S. Feldman
Producer: Eric Red
Writer: Eric Red
Producer: Mark Allan
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-10
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Movie Reviews of Near Dark
Movie Review: Now that thar's whut I call a REDNECK!
Summary: 5 Stars
Love bites! Love bleeds!
Tell it to bored Okie farmboy Caleb (Adrian Pasdar): for him, it's the oldest story in the world & the one he's looking for on a Saturday night:
Boy meets Girl. Boy wins Girl. Boy takes Girl to tractor pull.
But he doesn't figure on the special sauce. Nobody does.
That little modification throws in some groovy new beats to the mix: Girl Bites Boy. Girl leaves godawful nasty hickey on Boy's neck.
And, about an hour later: Boy lurches over tobacco fields in the Lower 40 with a hankering for meat considerably rarer than ground round.
I think it was the old vampire fighter Professor Abraham Van Helsing who observed of his undead foes "the Dead travel fast".
That was 1897: he shoulda got a load of the white trash bloodsuckers in Kathryn Bigelow's riotous "Near Dark", where the Undead ditch their long-haired gypsy servants & wagons for some real horsepower, muscling up and sunlight-proofing a Winnebago and carrying out a rampage of cold-blooded (or warm-blooded, or blooded, anyway, which is the point) killing spree across the windswept badlands.
Director Kathryn Bigelow & screenwriter Eric Red beat Tarentino & Rodriguez to the pop culture punch by more than a decade in this blood-drenched fusion of Southwestern Vampires and the joys of the tri-state killing spree, done right & done hard: "Near Dark" is a nihilistic little cinematic IED of battery acid, Semtex charge, sweat, rage, sex & desperation, all wrapped up in spikes & roadworn leather.
Breaking up may be hard to do, but it's murder if your lovely young pallid drifter hottie-of-the-moment Mae (the ethereal Jenny Wright, who vies with the flick's Tangerine Dream soundtrack for most dreamy movie presence here) has a family with a real aversion to laying down stakes.
No, literally.
Anyway, Caleb flees from what he is becoming, the Family follows, & the Law hunts all of them.
"Near Dark" is a child of the Night, no doubt, but even more it's a child of the eighties, a country-cousin (the one who mainlines white-lightning) to blood-soaked eighties stalwarts like "The Hitcher" and "Lost Boys": the snarling white-trash bloodsucker of the film's windswept Oklahoma hellscape has more in common with the mass murderering duo of "Badlands" than with the mincing machinations of Underworld's Eurotrash vamps or castrati courtliness of a Lestat.
That's what's cooking in "Near Dark": the vamps here are monsters. They're scary. They're a little feral. They stink of Death & the weary, endless blacktop. The tragically hip vamp of modern cinema is a fashion victim too hip to kill, too busy trying to Emo you to death to ever get around to killing you.
Not so with the nosferatu from "Near Dark", who offer up a different breed of bat: they're hungry, for one. They dispense with the Bau Haus & haute couture in favor of razor blades and sawed off shotguns; they worry more about running blood and less about running black mascara.
Bigelow raided James Cameron's casting wardrobe for her crack cast, & here it pays off: Paxton, Henriksen, & Vasquez form up the old Aliens trifecta and cook up a little downhome bloodletting attitude.
Bigelow's underworld is an unforgettable nightland of all-night diners and truckstops and endless blacktop lit up by neon and arc-sodium and flickering, hissing fluorescent, where you look half dead even if you're still trucking around your 5 quarts of red slosh, baby.
There's something breathtaking about the way Bigelow squares and stages and fixes her action: the steady waltz of doom and sadness and savagery in the bar-scene to the strains of "the Cowboy Rides Away", for one, possibly the first time in history sheer infinite boredom caused a barfight, which midwifes a slaughter.
Or the Siege: the riveting syncopation of the blackpowder ballet as M16 bullets tear holes in walls of seedy motel flop where the vamps have holed up and dug in after their latest killing spree, death borne not of the bullets but the rents of sunlight they unleash on the room-temperature desperados.
"Near Dark" is as cool as the tailfin on a Shelby cobra, but it's not all empty style: there's an overarching sense of awe front and center, whether it's the stark & sere emptiness of its midwestern urban badlands, haunted by its own faded fallowness, or the hard-bitten ghoulishness of its monsters. It's the landscape, in fact, that becomes almost a central character here, spinning out its own calculus in crafting the food that drifts across this dusty backstage Night Land and the predators who hunt them.
There are vampires---& then there are vampires.
And the worst of them take more than your blood.
JSG
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