‘The Other Side of Darkness’ Review
Stars: Maggie Callahan, Olivia Billings, Drake Tobias, Scott C. Davies, Brett Voina, Douglas Esper, Tiffani Hilton, Gregory James, Nathanial Weiland | Written and Directed by Adam Deierling
On paper, The Other Side of Darkness reads like a socio-political take on an old-school kids action-adventure movie like The Goonies and Frog Dreaming… essentially this wants to be Red Dawn for the modern generation.
A 16 year-old girl receives a mysterious birthday gift that leads her and her friends on an adventurous collision course towards a plot to dismantle America’s power grid.
See? But in reality, The Other Side of Darkness doesn’t really know what it is. The film opens with our heroine, Taylor, getting fired from her job, a job it turns out is working for her stepfather, who offers to give her the job back if she sleeps with him. Then Taylor gets a weird parcel in the mail with keys to a storage locker, a locker that contains a jeep. And that is where the adventure starts. Taylor jumps in the jeep with her friend Hannah and her brother Patrick. And while all this is going there are news reports of power cuts across America, gas is running short at petrol stations… Ominous stuff.
Now all of that seems to suggest we’re in for a rip-roaring adventure. But The Other Side of Darkness is anything but. Well, unless you call accidentally falling over action and adventure! Instead we get lots of wandering around woods and caves, talking and not doing. And a myriad of drone shots of the hills and forests… The usual thing when you don’t have a decent budget for anything else!
Speaking of budget, what the filmmakers behind The Other Side of Darkness do seem to have spent the money on is the soundtrack. A soundtrack tries its damnedest to prove otherwise, including a score that tries its best to emulate John Williams’ work and the soundtracks of Steven Spielberg’s movies. Hell, the film even tries to turn the old John Denver song Take Me Home, Country Roads into a John Williams-sounding bombastic set-piece!
Unfortunately not even a gloriously over the top soundtrack can stop The Other Side of Darkness from dragging. The film runs almost two hours. TWO HOURS. And there’s more than enough footage of our protagonists wandering around or talking nonsense to cut the film down by 30 minutes at least. Making this a fast-paced 90-minute film would most definitely have helped with what the filmmakers were trying to do: recapture the glory of the aforementioned adventure movies of the 80s. Actually BE a new take on Red Dawn.
Instead we’re left with a film that feels like a Christian apocalyptic movie that’s had all the religious overtones removed and replaced with insurgent conspiracy theories!
