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Cold and Dark (2005)

Dir: Andrew Goth

John Dark (Luke Goss) is a professional, down to earth Copper and when he is paired with the
flamboyant, ruthless and vicious detective Mortimer Shade (Kevin Howarth) he is thrust into a very different form of Policing.

The two Cops are on the trail of a group of human traffickers run by the son of a high ranking Government Minster.
They follow the trail to a container warehouse where they split up to search.
Suddenly Dark hears shooting and rushes into the warehouse to find numerous bloodied corpses of illegal Chinese immigrants, some dead gangsters and a seemingly dead Shade!
But when blood pours into Shade’s mouth, from a corpse hanging above him, he suddenly awakens in perfect health and as the two Cops leave the scene unbeknownst to them the corpse bursts into flames.

A breakthrough in the case is then undermined when Stein, a key suspect, is released when strings are pulled by a mysterious female Agent named Albany (Carly Turnbull). Stein is actually an informer and Albany wants him on the streets. Dark is annoyed, but Shade is strangely calm about it.

And when Stein’s lawyer, and various other criminals involved in the case, start turning up as ripped open corpses it’s clear why Shade was so calm, as he’s now taking care of the bad guys his way. With the help of the alien beast that now dwells within him…

The set-up sounds intriguing and it’s nice for a British film to go the genre route. But the following positives are quite frankly the only things remotely rewarding here.

First off the film looks great with some fine, bleak, urban cinematography by Sam McCurdy (who worked on the far, far more satisfying Brit horror films “Dog Soldiers“ and “The Descent“ for wunderkind Neil Marshall) and with the cold blues and steel greys the movie has an effective visual atmosphere.

The film also has quite a lot of the red stuff splashed around, with a bizarre, frantic, blood spurting scene in a toilet cubicle (with the infamous, Homosexual ‘Glory Hole’ in the partition playing a vital part) being an early highlight.
And although most of the time we only see the messy aftermath of Shade’s kills (after lots of crunching and squelching noises) there are a couple of fun blood spurting chest mutilations and all in all the movie is suitably moist.

The creature FX are less successful though. Shade’s ‘beast’ reveals itself via his hand mutating into a claw with a fang filled tube that uncoils from it. Sometimes this is shown via a pretty good prosthetic but also by some pretty damn bad CGI. It’s basically a more bendy version of the stabbing mouth protrudence of Giger’s Alien.

And so sadly it’s on to all the things that are wrong with “Cold and Dark”.

The script by Joanne Reay is the main culprit here. It’s full of dialogue that never gets past the pretentious, the self-consciously hip, and the absurd.
And in Kevin Howarth they have an actor that is the exact twin of this dialogue. He delivers every sentence in a mixture of husky whisper and hard man growl and quite frankly he’s so theatrical and laughably ‘smouldering’ in everything he does you simply can’t take Shade remotely seriously, even with a killer eel sticking out of his palm.

Carly Turnbull joins Howarth in the annoyingly ‘I’m just so damn cool aren’t I?’ style of annoying acting and her attempts to look tough and sexy are simply funny.

Luke Goss (one time member of 80’s British boy band sensation “Bros” of course) is not much better, but he’s certainly less self-conscious and (unlike Howarth) leaves most of his ego at home. But he’s still all growling delivery and hard man strut. Certainly he’s nowhere near as good as his revelatory performance in “Blade 2”.
And Luke, baby, no matter how ‘tough’ and swaggering you do it…no one can make peeling and eating a banana in the bath remotely cool!

Away from the dialogue the screenplay other fault is the frustratingly fragmented and obscure plot.
Much of the movie is individual scenes stuck directly together rather than scenes that flow together and are linked into a cohesive whole.
Basically a large proportion of the plot jumps around from one event to the other with little or no time spent on the journey getting there. Things just simply and suddenly happen, often leaving you wondering either what’s going on, or what just happened.
Dark’s reaction, and it’s aftermath, to the sudden discovery of his partner’s otherworldly state (as he rips open a villain’s chest with his alien digits in front of him!) is astonishingly matter of fact and basically glossed over for example. As if this huge event is of no real importance.

The plot is also filled with some astonishingly bad and utterly regretful support characters.
The less said, for example, about the annoyingly, ridiculously eccentric, kilt wearing, utterly unbelievable Police Commissioner (veteran C grader David Gant) and his insane and theatrical rants the better!
The other main support culprit is also the most unusual casting!

Comic performer Matt Lucas (from the amazingly successful BBC sketch show “Little Britain”) makes a belated appearance as some kind of, typically eccentric/waistcoat sporting, paranormal investigator who seems to know about the creature (no explanations at all about how) and attaches himself to Dark to get close to the beast, which he calls ‘The Grail’.
It’s not a bad performance as such (although just as theatrical as everyone else) but Lucas carries far too much comic baggage to make his involvement artistically justifiable from a serious movie making point of view.
And the posh, eccentric, rather effeminate and completely unlikely ‘X Files’ character he plays just makes it even more absurd.
He’s also given the last line in the film and quite frankly the less said about this ending the better!

So yes, it’s nice to see the UK film industry (other than Neil Marshall) do a genre piece instead of yet another upper crust comedy or gritty urban drama, but it would also be nice if said genre piece was actually any good, and sadly “Cold and Dark” (a few positive aspects aside) is anything but good.