lovecraft231 There's nothing wrong with paying respect to your influences. Many a genre film past and present has done this, and sometimes to great success. It's usually for not though, as many directors trying to respect the directors and movies that they love end up coming off as immature fan-boys or people without an original bone in their body. While Marc De Launay's "Dark Nature" doesn't fall for those traps, it's still a mess.Somewhere in Scotland, a very dysfunctional family is on vacation. There's a bit of a problem though-there's a killer whose knocking people off. Oh, and some of the requisite oddball characters who exist only to be killed show up as well.There are a few things "Dark Nature" get's right. The score is pretty good, some of the cinematography and footage of nature is beautiful, and the gore is pretty cool. That's where the fun ends though, as much of the movie is De Launay paying tribute to the likes of Dario Argento, Mario Bava ("Twitch of the Death Nerve" seems to be the primary influence here,) "Friday the 13th" and old ecological horror films like "Long Weekend." While he manages to thankfully do so without pilfering from said movies, he still gets a whole lot wrong.For one thing, it's never that scary or intriguing. The aforementioned movies and directors managed to create a sense of dread and suspense to go with everything else. However, the director here seems clueless as to how to do that, as he can't even pull off a decent atmosphere. Also, all of the characters are extremely annoying. People like the entomologist and the psychic are supposed to be interesting in an odd way, but they are more annoying if anything. And don't get me started with the family, especially the daughter. So much time is spent with this obnoxious bitch that the viewer is left exhausted.And then there's all of the talk. There's a lot of it here-and let it be known there is a difference between dialog and talk. Dialogue is interesting and helps with the characters. This movie is so talky that there were moments in which I started to remember the films of Andy Milligan-and that's not a good thing. Oh, and let's not forget the whole ecological message in the movie, which in a shocking surprise falls flat. The film wants to be a commentary on man's mistreatment of nature, yet it can't make that work. It instead comes off as a poor man's mix of "Friday the 13th" and Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist." It's a shame that I didn't like the movie, as there are a few neat things in it, and I do think that it had potential to be good. What I got though was a talky, boring mess of a movie. I expect better, and the audience deserves better too. At least it's better than the movies of Dante Tomaselli.

Seb I love horror movies and I don't mind a good thriller but this is neither. I realised halfway through that I was watching a virtual remake of an equally pointless Italian flick I'd already seen. I was hoping I was wrong but I wasn't, this is every bit as witless and shares the same pathetic ending.Rip up the first 40 minutes of this film and throw it away, it has no bearing on the rest of the movie. There's some killings rendered dull by the flat pace and boring killer. There's some victims but they are completely dull and lifeless too.To cap it off there's a message about the world cleansing itself or something and pure crap that is too. It doesn't even make sense within the confines of the dreamlike situation it tries to create. This is a pitiful boring movie and anyone rating it over two stars is most definitely in it, directed it or just has no taste in movies. Don't waste your time, it's beyond terrible.

yousoldmysoulforpogs Perhaps when I took my seat, waited twenty minutes through darkness and up came a DVD menu on the cinema screen wasn't exactly what I expected. The film had a very limited cinema release (i.e. twice a week for a month in Cineworld, and that was it) so I was determined to catch at least one showing. When beginning to describe the film, low-budget doesn't scratch the surface, the whole movie no doubt filmed entirely on the Southwest coast of Scotland in the film-makers' back garden. It's a horror/slasher flick in all fragances but it fails badly to pin the woes of the killer on a "you're killing the earth, so we're killing you" twist. It's obvious that although the film tries its very best to be serious (it fails), the dialogue makes numerous nods to slasher films of yore (such classic lines like "He wasn't strong enough" and "The Earth fights back"). Why in God's name didn't they go all out B-movie slasher tribute style, I don't know - because the narrative strengths (if they exist) lie completely in the moments in the film where the killer is honing in on his prey. All in all, the film ends up lamehat because it indeed takes itself far too seriously when it really had no chance at all with the kind of budget it had. Gets a better rating because of the reasonably convincing gore and the slightly present "so-bad-it's-good" factor, but overall the producers should have thrown the script in the writer's face and said "bring back some GOAR!".

SC-20 Don't be fooled by the low budget - there are plenty of gory surprises in this bloody thriller about a family holiday gone horribly wrong, as well as a sprinkling of red herrings and twists.Director Marc de Launay contrasts the shocks with lingering shots of the deceptively peaceful scenery (the setting is Cumbria but it was filmed in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland), but the accompanying score never allows the edge-of-the-seat tension to drop.This is one for the genre fans - unlike in Hollywood slashers, there are close-up shots of the wounds and spurting blood. Not to mention a hands-over-the-eyes finale involving the optimistic setting of an ancient animal trap...