AGAINST THE DARK

A virus is decimating humanity, transforming people into bloodthirsty creatures fragile in sunlight. The few survivors are trying to get by as best they can, and among them is a group of people who have barricaded themselves in an abandoned hospital to escape the attacks of the infected, not knowing that the same building is full of "monsters." Meanwhile, a team of vigilantes hired by the government, called "The Hunters," penetrate the building in search of survivors. "Last Night – Death in the Night" is the poor title given by the Italian distribution in place of the much more suggestive "Against the Dark," or Steven Seagal against the vampires. Yes, you read that right, this film is nothing more than one of the many direct-to-video productions that the former action film star produces and stars in for the happiness of his fans. But be careful! If in recent, very poor films "our man" was the absolute protagonist engaged in shaky plots that were a pretext for tacky action, in "Last Night" Seagal is one of the many characters who appears little on screen and in a decidedly "accessory" role, without which the story would have gone on without changing a bit. So, horror fans of Steven Seagal, if hearing about this film brings tears of joy to your eyes, temper your enthusiasm because as horror "Last Night" is pitiful and as a Steven Seagal film there are certainly no words of comfort. But let's explore the two aspects on which a product like "Last Night" could have had winning cards. The premise for the success of a film of this kind is to find a good combination of horror and action, something that has undoubtedly been attempted, but with results that leave one really perplexed. The starting point (quite shameless) is "I Am Legend," contaminated by "28 Days Later" for what concerns the design of the infected. We will therefore have a story that plagiarizes Matheson's novel in many aspects, including the reversal of roles (the "different" ones are not the infected, now the majority of the population), thus exploiting the success of the film with Will Smith, but showing only a poverty of content that is matched by the equally embarrassing aesthetic rendition. For obvious budget reasons, the film is completely set in squalid interiors, leaving only the narrator's voice the task of creating "vast" suggestions of apocalyptic disaster, never succeeding in a credible way. The more purely horror component is entrusted to the attacks of the infected on the protagonists, frequent very fast clashes that show nothing (or manage to show) focusing on sporadic splatter details (always the same, repeated several times) of cannibalistic meals and bloodied mouths. A waste of time, in short. The action, then, is the big joke of this film. If we analyze Steven Seagal's career, we will see how his filmography is entirely composed of action-polizeischi films that have followed one another for twenty years with peaks of box office success at the beginning of his career (and an unexpected return at the end of the '90s) and then a host of "grocery" productions (about 4 per year) destined for the home video market that struggle with unimaginable levels of qualitative baseness. Even in the most abysmal action movies of this last decade, however, the embossed Seagal has always guaranteed a dose of action sufficient to quench the aikido thirst of loyal spectators, but with "Last Night" even this small pleasure is denied. It is evident that the film is not properly thought out for Seagal and that the actor's character has been somewhat forcibly inserted without which the story would proceed practically unchanged; in fact, he plays Tao, the leader of the "Hunters" (congratulations for the originality of the name of these vigilantes...), an old man who wants to appear young thanks to a toupee, a facial tan from a lamp, a leather duster style "Matrix" and a sword on his back to kill vampires, which instead does a lot of "Blade." This gentleman is accompanied by three other hunters, the similar wrestler Tanoai Reed and two models who remain constantly in the background. Their contribution to the film is minimal, in fact the story mainly follows the group of boys trapped in the building, occasionally remembering to show the hunters walking: in an alley, in the hospital corridor, in the laboratories, in the basements... they walk, walk and walk. The action of "Last Night" is represented by the long walks of Steven Seagal dressed as Blade and his three bodyguards. When one remembers to insert a hand-to-hand combat, the poor direction of the debutant Richard Crudo does everything to put together confused scenes that abuse clumsily and without logic of reality and speed-ups, as if one were in a parody of Zack Snyder's films. In short, a lot of boredom, zero fun and no new ideas for what turns out to be a double disappointment, both for those who want a contagion horror and for those who want an action with Steven Seagal. Lovers of trash, avoid carefully, despite the premises the film in question causes only an unstoppable chain of yawns.