THE BLACKOUT

December 24th. It's an unusually bright, warm Christmas Eve in America and the residents of one particular Los Angeles-based tenement block - The Ravenwood - busy about their respective businesses while the threat of Santa's big day looms.

No one seems overly concerned by the occasional tremors, and the TV reports stating that this is the hottest Christmas Eve on record.

We meet the Pierce family, headed by affable father Daniel (Joseph Dunn); then, in another flat, we have the pretty but unhappy Claire (Caroline Rich); elsewhere there is a party of in-building revellers that begrudgingly includes gate-crashing Lenny (Ace Gibson).

And a plethora of other characters are there too, all of whom are introduced quite quickly in the opening 10 minutes and, to be honest, never really struck a chord beyond that point.

As the night progresses and the tremors become more profound, the power in the apartment block fails. Cue candles. And bickering. And people wandering alone into dark passages in a manner that hasn't been seen since SCREAM first ridiculed such ludicrous behaviour some 14 years ago.

Anyway, the Pierce son Kyle (Tyler Armstrong) is the first to foray unwisely into a darkened laundry room for no good reason and discover a weird little beasty scuttling across the concrete floor. He's not the last; the building's residents soon realise that, with no light and no electricity at their disposal, they are not alone ... there are murderous aliens in the block too!

As the city around them falls into darkness too, the building's inhabitants try to put their differences to one side and work together while realising that perhaps these nocturnal monsters are not only in their midst, but are everywhere ...

Disjointed and episodic to begin with, but not unlike Robert Altman's SHORT CUTS in the opening pre-plot sequences (stretch your imagination to agree with me, please), THE BLACKOUT is awkward from the offing but not without merit. The attempts at characterisation, however flimsy, are acknowledged and the feel of low-budget indie cool comes through while an air of mystery about where the film's headed still exists.

However, once it's revealed that killer aliens are loose and a motley bunch of fuckwits must stop their squabbling for one night to work together, the film does the opposite of what it should do. That is, it should suddenly become focused and pile-drive itself home. Instead it falls apart and becomes even more disjointed.

So, THE BLACKOUT is an initially intriguing but ultimately tension-free exercise. It's also low-budget, but looks okay thanks to its occasionally filtered lighting and the stylishly sparse apartment settings. The FX are crap, but as this resembles the tackiest of 80s Charles Band productions anyway (PARASITE; GHOULIES; TERRORVISION) that seems weirdly acceptable. But only if you're of that disposition where you can tolerate that shit in the right spirit.

Competently shot, edited and lit, the other strongpoint of THE BLACKOUT is that it really does evoke those cheap low-budget sci-fi-horrors of the mid-to-late 80s. Even down to Justin R Durban's meandering electronic score.

If you can imagine the aforementioned Mr Band reworking THE DEADLY SPAWN, you won't be far off.

The disc from Kaleidoscope Entertainment presents the film uncut in an appealing anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer. Colours are good, blacks are strong, compression and image enhancement are never issues. There is no digital noise, and no grain: the picture offered on this early screener disc was very good indeed.

English 2.0 was also a very clean, clear proposition.

This being an early screener disc, there were unfortunately no menus or extras available. The DVD is available at such a nice pre-order price (it's August 1st as I write - the DVD is released on August 30th) that, even if there are no bonus features on the eventual retail release, it seems like a fair proposition to me.

With a host of bizarre but under-developed characters, a cheap setting and a loopy premise, THE BLACKOUT takes itself more seriously than it should. But, at the same time, I do feel that perhaps I'm being a tad harsh: the film echoes those trashy low-budget horror films of the 1980s so much that it seems unfair to judge it by more contemporary standards.

But, fuck it. You make a film in 2009 (as this was), so you can be judged by 2009 standards. It's silly. It's puerile. It's unconvincing. I enjoyed it once it got going, and loved the fact that it was so gloriously out of step with everything else I've seen recently. But fans of the modern fluff, or relative newcomers to the genre, would be wise to give this a wide berth.

On the other hand, if you have a warm spot for bollocks like TITAN FIND (me too, my friend), then I reckon you could enjoy this.

So, I really did appreciate Robert David Sanders' feature debut THE BLACKOUT but can't honestly say whether anyone else will. Sorry!

Review by Stu Willis