Movie Review by Nigel A. Messenger
Starring: Laura Regan, Marc Blucas, Ethan Embry, Dagmara Dominczyk, Jon Abrahams
Director: Robert Harmon
What can I say about this movie that won’t sound like I’m slamming it into the ground without good reason?
To explain my introduction, I’ll give you a brief plot outline. Julia (Laura Regan) meets a childhood friend Billy (Jon Abrahams), who seems to be having a nervous breakdown because he says “they” are after him. He then wastes himself with a bullet to the head in front of Julia.
Naturally upset she attends his funeral where she meets two of his friends, Sam (Ethan Embry) and Terry (Dagmara Dominczyk), who seem a little strange themselves. It transpires that they are also both afraid of “they” and now Julia herself is also starting to experience unusual events in her life.
All these people have one thing in common – they are all experiencing “night terrors”. However they all have something else in common – none of them have any sense at all!
The “they” of the title are afraid of the light so this bunch of idiots do everything at night and in dark places. When Terry hears a strange noise coming from the ventilation shaft she sticks her head into it and when she sees something move she leaves her head in the dark shaft. She also goes to a public swimming pool with no one except “they” for company and even showers in the half-light of an empty shower room.
Julia, the female lead, is just as bad, driving on isolated roads in the pitch black of night and trying to escape by running into a deserted underground train station at 2 am, getting herself locked in and finally getting off a train in the middle of a tunnel just because it had stopped at a red light for a few minutes.
More inconsistencies include:
Why did Billy have a drawer full of batteries and yet there were no flashlights around and in any case he knew “they” interfered with electrical items which is confirmed when Julia’s flashlight won’t work when “they” are around?
Why didn’t “they” stop finding Julia when she pulled the “thing” out of her head that “they” used to track their victims with?
Incidentally no one in this film has bad dreams or even nightmares, they all have “night terrors”. It’s a pity they didn’t have “movie terrors” instead so they could avoid acting in bad B-movies.
