Native blood. After the commercial failure of “Robot Jox”, director Stuart Gordon went straight to TV, where he directed one of his most unknown films called “Daughter of Darkness”. This movie is more habitually called horror, although it is not at all, because the plot itself and the atmosphere surrounding the main characters do not contribute to the viewer being stunned or truly frightened. This picture simply does not have in its arsenal of terrible nightmares or terrible screamers, so you should not expect a sensation from such a film, because in itself it is poor, cheap and dull.
It remains a mystery how Gordon was lured to the shaky stage of television, but now it is more surprising not even that, but the poor quality of the tape. The story in it is three-kopeck, so the viewer will be able to understand in an instant simple combinations and intrigues that serve for the cinema as a kind of skeleton that holds with creak the entire plot design. According to the idea, a young girl flies to Romania, hoping to find her father, whom she has not seen for twenty years, after which various mysticism begins to occur with her, as well as the most natural encounters with vampires.
Agree that such a stamped receiver already from the threshold shouts that the “Daughter of darkness” is a passable and disposable thing in which you can follow events superficially, even everyday, and at the same time completely do not lose the thread of the narrative. It would seem that Gordon himself is at the helm, but there is no drive, energy, a kind of highlight in his next tape, mixed with the share of eccentricity and artistic experiments recognized by the master. When watching, the thought sharpens our heads that the director worked on the project by inertia, working his bread without enthusiasm, as if he were a wage worker.
“Daughter of Darkness” seems to be thickly smeared with butter; even if you sit on the fifth point and roll on it until the final, nothing will change. The plot gradually acquaints us with an unpretentious fairy tale about how a lonely girl must understand the cause of the disappearance of her father, in what she will be helped by a talkative taxi driver, a young attaché in the US Embassy, or even a strange musician who radiates a ton of magnetism on a woman, under the influence of which young birds lose their heads and immediately strive to jump to him in bed. This alone is enough to immediately understand the craving of the creators for simple clichés and conventions.
Naturally, while watching, the heroine will encounter Gothic evil, namely vampires, who in Romania have long become a cultural phenomenon, imbuing every corner with their constant stay. By the way, “Daughter of Darkness” is not going to somehow change the law of the genre, because her bloodsuckers still sleep in coffins or boxes, fear the sun and dream in secret from the rest of humanity to seize power over the whole world and find a place under the sun. Everything is quite fresh, flat and template. The screenwriter was clearly not in the punch when he wrote about how the unfortunate Catherine will be rushed from corner to corner and suffer from the unknown about his father.
Of course, communication with the ancestor will be difficult to establish, because for this you need to find witnesses, penetrate the old archives and face the gloomy underbelly of the city, then visit the old family castle, from where all the evil spirit fell two hundred years ago. One way or another, “Daughter of Darkness” is not a project where you sit and freeze with tension, because there is almost none in it at all. Heroes do not depart from the drawn lines, it is difficult for them to empathize and some of them are registered for a tick, because there should always be a secret community among vampires. In general, we have a quite familiar picture, where everything is already beaten and familiar in advance.
Gordon does his job well, but it lacks the usual scope, epic, rage and madness, or something. “Daughter of darkness” for such a director seems parochial, whose boundaries and conventions constrain its author, who previously shot films of a completely different nature. Before that, he had “Reanimator” or all the same “Robot Jox”, where the director put interesting experiments or played with meanings, but there is none of this and will never be again. An ordinary vampire novel about how the bonds of native blood can stop the arrival of evil and the flowering of blood-sucking creatures, cherishing their stagnant dreams and plans.
That’s all, there’s nothing else to talk about. Of course, in this film there is Anthony Perkins, the star of “Psycho” Alfred Hitchcock, the pretty Mia Sarah, as well as a bunch of other unknown artists who are not too lucky to get into this pool of weak passions under the yoke of lunar Romanian nights, but their efforts are clearly not enough to pull “Daughter of Darkness” by the ears from the captivity of secondary and rapid oblivion, where the movie after many years and got. The budget was small, so Gordon this time got a passing and naive picture of love, fatherly devotion and vampires living in basements and sleeping in coffins.
5 out of 10