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Nollywood Movie Review: DARK

“DARK”

A RUKKY SANDA FILM

RUKKY SANDA STUDIOS

Ratings 3/10

Trailer DARK

Movie Premiere Movie Premiere “DARK”

Reviewed by Vivian Nappier

dark poster

Happy New Year to all our readers, 2015 was a very interesting year in the world of Nollywood. From good movies to bad movies, we conquered it all.

After all the New Year celebrations, I decided to start the year with the movie “DARK” and boy was I in for a treat. Without further elaborations, let us dive into the movie.

“DARK” is a movie written, produced, directed and also starring Rukky Sanda. It is a story about a mother that takes revenge on a doctor that cared for her deceased daughter. The main focus of the story is on parents who are workaholics and sometimes place their jobs before their family. It also aims towards forgiveness and avoiding temptations no matter how convenient the situation is. 

Rukky Sanda plays Tracy, a grieving and psychotic mother of Precious (Adunni Taiwo), that stalks and almost murders the family of Dr Delphine Phillips (Monalisa Chinda) for not having the ability to save her daughter’s life while in surgery. She creates a false friendship with the family, starts an affair with the husband, Kayode (Van Vicker) and kidnaps their son, Karl (D’marion Young). She tries turning Karl into Precious to fill her void but gives up hope when Karl continues to humiliate her about never living up to the expectation of his mother. She eventually poisons Kayode with some “magical potion” rubbed on a knife and tries murdering Karl before she gets killed by the police.

Congratulations to Rukky Sanda for holding up to all the responsibilities that come with Directing, Producing, Writing and Acting, it takes a lot to handle each role and combined, she did an amazing job. It is a bold step and I hope as time progress, she focuses more on Directing and Producing.

With that being said, this movie was a total and complete MESS. There are movies that are labeled so bad it’s so good, and so bad it’s completely hilarious and then there are movies that are so bad it makes your skin crawl, and sadly, that is where “DARK” falls into.

The acting overall was predictable and laughable but the acting from Rukky Sanda was mediocre, but then again it always has been with Rukky Sanda. Perhaps, she should just stick to directing and step away from acting in her own movies. That may have helped with all the unnecessary scenes and continuity errors that took place in this movie. Like going from evening to daytime as Kayode drives to pick up Karl from school at 3pm.

night time dark

day 2 dark  Or Parent grieving their kidnapped child at amusement parks at night… aren’t these places supposed to be closed at a certain hour? How did he get in?

amusement park

The sound is unbelievably bad in this movie, it is so bad, there is barely any audible sound in a majority of the scenes. It basically turned into sign language and lip reading for me. Just when I thought Nollywood was starting to get it together with sound, we get a production like this. I actually thought I had tinnitus a couple of times, the echo in some scenes almost made me deaf!

There were way too many unnecessary flashbacks in the movie that had no meaning or impact to the story. The movie dragged on for way too long, it was basically 2 hours and 28 minutes of cars moving, loud cries, legs, evil stares, stalking, cars moving again, hooded capes, cringe worthy killing moments and finally a supposed surprise ending of happy every after. This movie could have been edited down to 1 hour of movie time and maybe then, it would have been much more appreciated.

The music score had an 80’s vibe to it, some really familiar, some not so much, don’t even get me started on the “Raymond Wong; Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained” soundtrack that was used towards the ending of this movie without crediting the owner.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained Soundtrack

it took a lot to give this movie a 3 out of 10 rating and that’s because it takes a lot to be a director, producer, writer and actor in your movie and still have it presentable to the public… even though it will probably leave a frown on people’s face.

I hope to see better movies as the year progress.

Happy New Year to everyone!

What do you think?

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