Written by Joe Gause
Where to begin? I guess I’ll tell you the plot (if you want to call it a plot). The Ghost. (Daniel Baldwin) is a crazy kidnapping murder, who loves young girls. But not hot girls; average, boring girls. (This isn’t my opinion, they state this in the film.) Trying to catch him are two detectives (enter the beyond bad acting). The female detective played by Jessie Metcalfe is something out of a made for TV movie, dressing like a hooker and acting like a middle school drama student. (My apologies if you read this, Jessie, but come on.) Other than Daniel Baldwin, don’t expect to recognize anyone in the cast.
Anyway, The Ghost likes to torture women in really disturbing ways; binding them and beating them, snipping their genitals with wire cutters, and don’t forget the scene where he stuffs rotting human flesh up one girl’s vagina and sews it shut. (Needless to say this one isn’t kid friendly.) Basically the film is split up into three parts. Part 1. The Ghost torturing women. Part 2. Lots of girls crying. Part 3. Horrible cop scenes. Thank God most of the movie is Daniel Baldwin being a complete nut job (which he does so well). To be honest, I loved Baldwin’s acting. If you were to put his character and acting in another story line, it would have been awesome. As for the rest of the acting, the girls’ crying was well done. (I’m looking for silver linings here, folks). Visually it was really dark; you don’t see too much, but what you do see is quite disturbing. Makeup effects were done well in some areas and looked really bad in some scenes.
In my opinion this film screams “ I want to be Hostel”, but it’s no; in fact it’s far from it. It’s OK to make a shock film, but at least give it a good story line. The only good decision the creator made was hiring Baldwin, then he messed up by putting him in this movie. I’m a horror fan, but this one left me pretty upset. The ending is like a smack in the face. It’s like they lost the last six pages of the script and said “oh well, that’s a wrap”. Some will say it’s the perfect cliffhanger, gearing us up for a sequel. I would like to publicly say, “Please do not make a sequel”.
Well that’s all I have to say about Darker Reality. In my opinion I’d say rent it, don’t buy it. I only say rent because Baldwin’s role is worth watching once. It’s so crazy and well played (he improvised most of his dialog) that it will give you something to talk about with your friends. I know I’ll be sharing this gem with a few of mine.
