Dark Chamber (2008)
Review by Chris Jacques
Dark Chamber seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. In prepping this review, I took the obligatory peek at the IMDB profile for this film, and there I found a movie called Under Surveillance. Turns out, that’s another of the three titles for this 2006 film, the third being my favorite, Camera Obscura. This isn’t a rare thing for horror movies, gialli in particular, as some names don’t always produce an idiomatically correct translation from one language to the next. The trouble comes when the movie in question mimics the name-game in its execution.
Take, for example, the cover art: a shirtless blonde (who isn’t in the movie) has a pentagram carved into her back, bleeding down her spine and generally looking all sorts of horror-rental-rack-appropriate. Let the red herrings begin, as there’s nothing in the movie that’s going to really be representative of this image at all.
Not judging the book by its cover and getting into the movie itself, one finds that the mood of Dark Chamber strays from both the title and the cover. Had I encountered the movie as Under Surveillance, I might’ve been less let down, as the movie plays decidedly more to the Hitchcock crowd than it does the Sleepaway Camp fans who might have enjoyed this movie based on the cover and the starring credit given to Felissa Rose, whose penis (of course, I know it wasn’t her penis…or was it? Of course not…or so?) was the keystone of that movie’s primary gimmick.
Speaking of Rose leads to an examination of the acting in general, and the examination finds that the acting is actually very serviceable, even good. It’s not always spot-on perfect, and every actor from top to bottom has a wooden moment, but it never really detracts from engagement in the characters, who were all written well enough by director/writer/actor Dave Campfield to rebound from anything that could be considered silly or out-of-context in another situation.
It’s that writing done by Campfield which ultimately saves the movie from being an outright bad experience. Every character is grey, whether seen through the black & white used for the surveillance scenes, or filmed in color. Each character has a clear purpose and sense of being, and every character has a secret to play off of another one of the characters. Dark Chamber is actually a very tight film in this regard, as the “whodunit?” aspect of the film really kept me second-guessing my predictions until the third act. The revelation of our true antagonist is a bit drawn-out, explained a bit too much like a Scooby-Doo villain, but the story continues to at least make sense, which is something that many movies, from micro-budgets to blockbusters, can absolutely fall apart in attempting to do.
Unfortunately, the writing is torn apart by the aforementioned surveillance camera filming contrivance that is key to the very idea of the Hitchcockian plot. No spoilers here, but some of the camerawork techniques employed in that third act absolutely blow out the fourth wall of the action. All of the hard and well-done work in building the plot is largely wasted as a result of some editing that provided information which shouldn’t have been available to the viewers unless it could have entirely contained within a single surveillance angle. Basically, it’s a minor gripe that became major because the aspect of surveillance was crucial to the unfolding story.
It’s this sense of being unfairly tricked through a gimmick or machination that stuck with me at the end of the movie. From the multiple titles that all shaded the movie differently (not that it matters, but my pick would’ve been Camera Obscura) to a camera technique that ignores its natural rules to provide unauthentic exposition, all the way down to the cover art that baits-and-switches its own sub-genre and tells potential viewers that Dark Chamber is actually inspired by a true story (while there is mention and inclusion of the Long Island “Say You Love Satan” killer, Ricky Kasso, and his “cult” called the Knights of the Black Circle, there is certainly not enough background given to that aspect to actually consider it anything more than a passing flirtation with the truly horrific and unsettling Kasso story), it’s hard to feel satisfied by the way anything in the film is really resolved.
With relatively sound acting, writing and coherence throughout, it feels as though Dark Chamber concludes without a clear understanding of its own identity. The movie, if fleshed out as it had been obviously intended, would’ve been just fine and rather enjoyable. As it stands, it doesn’t know what its aim is, and thus aims everywhere. Good for shotguns, bad for movies.
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