High Grade Diesel (Pitch Black (DVD))

Member Name: revere

Product:	Pitch Black (DVD)
Date:	07/02/09 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good characters, great script, well executed .

Disadvantages: slightly incongruous ending . Borrows on others of the genre

Picture the scene: First, you're on an interplanetary transport with a psychotic killer who can see in the dark. But he's chained up, so that's alright. Then the ship crashes on a deserted planet with only an abandoned mining village for shelter. But you survived the impact, so things could be worse. The aforementioned shiny-eyed loon breaks free in the crash, but he doesn't seem interested in picking you off just yet, so again, life could be much worse. Then, things start to go a little nuts.
Pitch Black is a mixture of many things. It's a sort of bastard hybrid Aliens vs. Classic 80s Stalk N' Slash, but it'd be grossly unfair to call it either of these things. The plot is pretty a pretty standard horror/sci-fi staple, as that psycho gets loose among the diverse-characters-with-a-dark-secret survivors, but the real tension gets racked up when the seasonal six month nighttime comes to the planet. You see, when it gets dark, all manner of flying betoothed (is that a word? It should be...) alien beasties start erupting from the honeycomb rocks. So, we're left with our band of misfits in a race against time to get back to their escape vessel as their light sources slowly diminish, and an uneasy alliance between the nutter-turned 'only guy who can save us in the dark'...

The stand-out here is Vin Diesel (also seen in Wall Street rip-off The Boiler Room,) as the ocularly-enhanced uber-baddie. If there is a downside to this gem, it's his rather unconvincing change of pathology at the end of the movie, but given the low budget (by Hollywood standards,) Pitch Black is an ingenious, tense piece of Sci-Fi with a satisfying amount of cool tech and nasty alien hostility.

Summary: Good characters, great script, well executed .