Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

moonspinner55 Jane and Cathy, British student nurses on holiday in the French countryside, take a break from bicycling on a dull stretch of road because Cathy, having eyed a gentleman in the previous village, wants to rest (and give him a chance to catch up). The more pragmatic Jane wants to reach the next town before nightfall and decides to head out on her own. Mystery story from screenwriters Brian Clemens and Terry Nation might either be called a compact thriller or a very unimaginative one--it literally goes nowhere but back and forth from town to the woods, into the woods and back out again. The usually-volatile Pamela Franklin has a rather benign role this time; she's curious unfettered upon discovering her friend has disappeared, courteous and polite to the strangers she tries to make conversation with, and not a very good detective or judge of character. The language barrier is a problem with a picture like this: Franklin must keep explaining everything we already know to the French villagers (potential suspects and wayward eccentrics) and we're not sure if they understand her or maybe just think she's insane (and vice-versa). The picture isn't a horror movie--there's hardly any blood shown--and director Robert Fuest guides it along with a sure hand, but it becomes repetitive. Franklin's Jane goes back to search for her friend, she gets a ride into town, she waits for her ride to come back, she hitches a ride back to the woods, she retrieves her bicycle, and then she goes on to the next town. It isn't an exciting film, nor an important one, but it does have an abundance of atmosphere and has been been produced in a very classy manner. The finale is underwhelming. The case does get solved, yet there are a lot of unanswered questions left in the movie's wake, as well as the feeling that Fuest did his very best to enliven this scenario without a lot of help from his writers. Remade in 2010. ** from ****

jimpayne1967 I saw this film for the first time in nearly forty years recently and was surprised at how well it stood up. When I saw it as a teenager I had thought the ending a bit corny but that the first 90 minutes up to the revelation as to identity of the killer were as tense as almost any film I had seen up to that point of my life that was not called Psycho. I have seen several tenser films since that night long ago but the ending was better than I gave it credit for too.The plot is simple enough. Two young English girls are on a biking holiday round France and they have different agenda for their trip. One, Kathy, is blonde and there for a party and to meet blokes whilst the other, Jane, is more sensible and apparently intent on doing a mileage similar to that of a rider in the Tour De France. Kathy takes a fancy to a suave young man, Paul, in a café and when Paul follows the girls on his Lambretta and the girls stop for a sunbathe Kathy falls out with Jane at least partly we suspect because she hopes Paul will double back to meet her. Jane goes on for a while then returns to her friend and discovers that she has disappeared. Paul arrives on the scene, conveniently, and tells her that he is a detective. Gradually Jane comes to disbelieve him and flees to the office of the local gendarme. Paul tracks her down and she escapes his desperate, threatening attempts to speak to her. She finds Cathy's dead body, bashes Paul on the head and rushes into the arms of the gendarme and then realises that he, not Paul, is the killer. The film ends with two more girls on bikes cycling through a rain storm whilst a police car heads towards the crime scene.The film looks great, the scenes of these two attractive young women cycling through the sunlit corn fields are idyllic and the growing menace is very well done. We know something has happened but not quite what. The locals seem an increasingly bizarre lot partly because the lack of subtitles makes us identify with an increasingly anxious Jane as we have no idea if they are hostile or not. And that damn Paul keeps turning up when he shouldn't.As I watched the film again I was reminded of the later Franco-Dutch classic Spoorloos ( The Vanishing) whilst the discovery of Cathy's body is like Jamie Lee Curtis in the wardrobe near the end of the original Halloween. And Soon The Darkness lacks the psychological insights of The Vanishing and is not as genuinely scary as Carpenter's slasher masterpiece but it is well done. Paul is played by Sandor Eles who was for many of us best remembered as Mr Paul the Maitre'D in the chronically bad soap Crossroads but he is fine here and John Nettleton as the gendarme is convincing and a million miles from his affable gossipy mate of Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. The two girls are good too. Michelle Dotrice as Kathy is best remembered as Frank Spencer's wife Betty but she looks good and is credible as the slightly sillier girl whilst Pamela Franklin is terrific as she gets more and more scared.You never stop wanting her to find her friend and when she is saved at the end I breathed a sigh of relief. And Soon The Darkness is not a great film though it certainly deserves a better reputation with critics for the 'guides' who seem to have based their sniffy reviews on the synopsis and the knowledge that the director, Robert Fuest, and writers, Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, had extensive backgrounds in pot boiler British television of the sixties and seventies. Not great but worth catching.

Spikeopath Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) are a couple of British nurses taking a bicycle vacation through rural France. When they have an argument, Jane storms off ahead leaving Cathy sunbathing on the grass. Later on Jane returns but can find no trace of Cathy, stuck in a foreign land and unable to speak the language, Jane soon finds herself in grave danger as she searches frantically for her lost friend.The title is about the protagonist trying to resolve a mystery/terror situation before the darkness falls. Film is completely set in daylight time, with a very limited amount of characters, and no extended bouts of dialogue. Looking at it from the outside, you would not be thought of as ignorant for expecting this to not be frightening or thrilling, yet it is both. The isolation of the countryside is a foreboding presence here, which coupled with Jane's isolation as a foreigner, makes for edgy atmospherics.Director Robert Fuest is in no hurry what so ever to start turning the screws, so the first half of pic is very slow, but patience is rewarded once the girls argue and split up. Then Fuest starts introducing peripheral characters, and writers Brian Clemens and Terry Nation dangle bits of dark information into the plot, about the area and its history. The mystery element is amped up high, the perpetrator could quite easily be anyone who Jane meets, and then we lurch into paranoia and peril when all will be revealed in a wave of daylight dreadfulness.Critics were (are) very much divided about the picture, complaints ranging from it being nasty and distasteful, to it being too laborious for its own good. But it has a very good fan base, and it certainly does what it sets out to do by putting those wiling to invest fully in it on to the edge of their seats. Recommended on proviso you are prepared to bare with it for the first 45 minutes. 7/10

HorrorQueen17 2 girls go on a cycling holiday to France. When one of them goes missing, it's up to the other one to try to find out what is going on and try to save her friend.The set up of this was pretty slow but it built up the atmosphere and tension really well. It is set in the French countryside and the sunshine is relentless, which was a nice change from horror movies being shot in a lot of darkness. A lot of the time people are speaking French and the protagonist doesn't understand the language, as there are no subtitles the audience doesn't either, which I thought was clever. While the ending was not unexpected, the amount of suspects did keep me guessing for a while and the film kept the tension building the whole way through. Pamela Franklin did a good job carrying the film mostly on her shoulders, and overall I think it was a very good, tense little thriller. It wasn't particularly scary, so don't see it if you're wanting a good fright, but as a thriller it was pretty good.