A good number of Steven Seagal’s films over the past half dozen years can be enjoyed as comedies by right-minded (and possibly intoxicated) genre fans, owing to their, umm… how to put it, streamlined production values, and penchant for hilarious ADR throw-aways during various bad guy beatdowns. Against the Dark, which actually holds some intrigue on a certain level — inserting its star into a supernatural genre that he’s thus far scrupulously avoided — unfortunately doesn’t even really offer much of a kick on that level. It’s just bad. Baaaaaaad…

The back cover of this straight-to-video release describes the film thusly: “Katana master Tao (Seagal) leads a special ops squad of ex-military vigilantes on a massacre mission. Their target: vampires. On the post-apocalyptic globe, sucked dry by bloodthirsty vampires, a few remaining survivors are trapped in an infected hospital. Tao is their only hope and he knows the only cure is execution. Now it’s time for the last stand against the flesh-eating vampires, and there’s nothing left to lose but the last of humanity.”

Yes, seriously, that’s exactly how it reads, “post-apocalyptic globe” and all. Now, for the specifics. Given how little he appears in the film, viewers wouldn’t necessarily know until late in the movie that Seagal’s character is named Tao, unless perhaps they’d read the back cover box. Most of the movie actually centers on two different groups of survivors, including Dylan (Daniel Percival, of Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj), Dorothy (Jenna Harrison), Morgan (Danny Midwinter) and young Charlotte (tyke Skye Bennett, looking baffled by the amateurishness around her), supposedly holed up in this “safe” hospital, which seems to house an awful lot of marauding vampires.

They all come together and then spend an inordinate amount of time talking about how they have to make it to an exit passageway “before the generator shuts down” and locks them in. (Nevermind that one couple has been chilling there for a couple weeks, just biding time.) Intercut with this main arc is a story strand — with Keith David and Linden Ashby — about an ordered military strike on the sector that houses the hospital, and Seagal’s Tao wandering about with his group of hunters.

Against the Dark was written by Matthew Klickstein (Dinner Time) and helmed by first-time director Richard Crudo, a seasoned cinematographer whose two most interesting credits — as director of photography on the original American Pie, and camera operator on Donnie Darko — are counterbalanced by the vast amount of cruddy straight-to-video product that otherwise litters his resumé. Neither scribe nor director shows much convincing imagination, and the dialogue is howlingly bad. In the “cold open” action sequence that kick-starts the movie, when there’s some modest bickering about the ensuing course of action, and where to next go, Seagal ends debate by growling, “We’re not here to decide what’s wrong or right, we’re here to decide who lives and dies.”

I’m not really sure what that means. But, worse, when they meet up, none of the other characters glom onto or even treat Tao as a heroic figure (or thank him for saving their lives, in the one or two instances he does), and even in scenes without Tao it seems as though large swatches of dialogue were assigned randomly, with no premium placed on the words spoken by other characters, either before or after it. Adding insult to injury, the film’s vampire hunting action is pretty lame, and even when Seagal is on screen most of the heavy lifting is left to Tanoai Reed, a cousin of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson who previously smashed heads on TV’s American Gladiators. He plays a character named Tagart (a shout-out to Fire Down Below?), the sole member of Tao’s crew that could be defined as anything more than a glorified extra. The other two? Chicks who don’t speak (perhaps because they can’t speak English?), which leads to an awkward mock-emotional moment where a grimacing Seagal silently eulogizes a character the audience doesn’t really know.

Housed in a regular Amaray plastic case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Against the Dark is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track, and a French language Dolby surround track. Optional English and French subtitles are included, and the only supplemental material comes by way of a short featurette, “Fighting the Shadows: Behind the Scenes of Against the Dark,” that showcases much more production savvy than the actual film itself. Including interviews with a solid array of below-the-line players and a few cast members — Crudo talks authoritatively about having worked with Seagal before, never mentioning
that it was only as a cinematographer, while Seagal,
lounging in his trailer, coughs up a few monosyllabic plot-point recaps — this eight-minute-ish tidbit makes a convincing case that the in-house featurette folks should be given their own production fund. Oh, there’s also an amusing tidbit where the stunt coordinator talks about reworking action blocking with Seagal on the fly, and incorporating the producer-actor’s thoughts. There’s no bitterness or acrimony to his recollection, though; dude just seems to recognize it’s all part of the paycheck on a Seagal movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. F (Movie) D+ (Disc)

A passably engaging claustrophobic horror thriller that a little more
than halfway through reveals the limitations of its mode of
storytelling and visual scheme, Quarantine is told entirely via
hand-held footage shot by one of its characters. The story — about a
television reporter who accompanies a group of firefighters and emergency responders into a Los
Angeles tenement building, only to get sealed in after encountering a
virulent, mutant strain of rabies — works for a while as a goosing
stylistic exercise before descending into nonsensical confusion,
hamstrung by aggressively panicked camerawork, a lack of spatial
clarity and a clumsy attempt at backstory explanation.

A remake of Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s 2007 Spanish thriller [Rec], Quarantine
skips any introductory credits, opening with human interest news reporter
Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter, above) and her cameraman, Scott
Percival (Steve Harris), on a shadow assignment and on site with a Los
Angeles fire department crew. Two firemen (Jay Hernandez and Johnathon
Schaech) are assigned as their guides for the evening, and some
flirting and good-natured chiding ensues between Angela and the guys.

Eventually responding to a late-night call with Angela and Scott in tow, the firefighters, as well as some policemen, come upon an elderly woman who bites one of the officers. When they attempt to get medical help, Angela and the first responders
find that they have been sealed in the building. They try to get out, but are repeatedly unsuccessful. With no power, cell
phone reception or immediate answers about their predicament, panic
mounts. Soon some of the rest of the residents — including a
veterinarian, an accountant and an immigrant couple — succumb to bites from both infected animals and humans, setting off a mad dash by
survivors to try to barricade themselves away from the frenzied,
foaming-mouthed diseased.

In similar fashion to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, Quarantine posits itself as an exercise in found footage. Director John Eric Dowdle
does a good job blending lurking, corner-of-one’s-eye mayhem with some
in-camera effects (one memorable sequence finds Scott using the camera
as a blunt-force weapon), but the script has trouble establishing a
clear timeline as it relates to the infected, so many times its switch-overs come across as cheaply dramatically convenient. Also, somewhat fatally, there’s never a keen sense of space established within the building. This renders much of Quarantine‘s shaky-cam action especially unclear and unsatisfying. Finally, a finale which attempts to further clarify the origin of the strain of rabies comes across as very puzzlingly conceived, and entirely at cross purposes with the adrenalized nature of the entire rest of the story.

Housed in a regular Amray plastic case with a cover shot that, quite curiously, is its own sort of spoiler, Quarantine comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and a French language Dolby surround sound track, as well as optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. A feature-length audio commentary track with writer-director Dowdle and writer-producer Drew Dowdle, who previously collaborated on The Poughkeepsie Tapes, kicks off the supplemental features, but the brothers don’t talk very much about the source material, and how it inspired and interested them, or how they might have diverged from it. A trio of short EPK-type, behind-the-scenes chat-fests serves as the crux of the bonus material; there’s your standard 10-minute making-of featurette, a special look at one of the movie’s stunts and also an eight-minute featurette on the movie’s make-up design, which showcases Robert Hall’s work. He’s one of the more interesting figures interviewed here, so kudos for the breakout recognition. Trailers for other Sony home video releases round out the affair. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)