A DARKER REALITY (2008)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed by Chris Kazmier
Written by Sxv’leithan Essex
Starring Daniel Baldwin, Sunny Doench, Alisha Seaton, and James C. Burns

A DARKER REALITY so much wants to be a cross between SE7EN and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS you can taste it. Across the board, the cast seems to really want you to believe in their performances, but upon viewing this serial killer/torture porn exercise, I found myself checking off one beat from a better film to the next in my mental checklist of superior shockers.

I know I’m not the only one to sit through the abomination that was TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION starring a then unknown Matthew McConaughey/Renée Zellweger disaster, but as I watched Daniel Baldwin act crazy in this film as its serial abductor/torturer/rapist/killer, all I could think about was TCM:TNG.

Here, Baldwin is trying his best to be scary, when in reality the stuff he says and does in this film borders on stupid and most certainly dives head-first into a deep pool of misogyny. Baldwin is over the top and back again as The Ghost, a man who abducts women and then tortures them in various ways while verbally abusing them until they end up dying. With his special needs manservant, The Ghost has a gaggle of half naked women to choose from, all of them model-like mannequins with very little by means of character. Baldwin’s abusive rantings are fascinating only because I can’t believe any name star would play this role as he has. In that, it’s a brave performance, but either the director didn’t really see how ridiculous things were getting or the script really was that bad. Either way, that cringe I felt while watching McConaughey spaz out in TCM:TNG came back big time every time Baldwin’s sweaty face appeared.

And he appears a lot. Most of the film is Baldwin in a basement with his mental midgetine assistant and a flock of bloody models. The script of A DARKER REALITY tries really hard to be fathomous, but ends up choking on five-dollar words and faux intellectualism. At its core, it’s 90 minutes worth of girls being abused with the torture interrupted every now and again by a pair of investigators 500 steps behind the killer. These detectives don’t even leave the house in this investigation; they just sit, interview one person each, and look at documents and pictures right up until the ending. The film succeeded in making me feel uncomfortable with the myriad of scenes of women in peril, but fails in creating characters or a story around all that abuse worth investing in.

The ending suggests that Baldwin’s The Ghost may return for some sort of sequel. Here’s hoping that won’t be the case.

Check out the trailer here!!