Pitch Black

There's no way I'm going to argue that 'Pitch Black' is a good movie. The editing is amatuerish, the plot's holes threaten to overwhelm it, the monsters behave inconsistently, and the movie goes from horror picture to bughunt with such alacrity that I doubt the creators even knew what kind of picture they were trying to make.

I liked it.

'Pitch Black' starts with a bang, which is just what I was in the mood for. An interstellar transport encounters a meteor shower and lots of things go wrong very quickly, culminating in a fiery crash that pegged my "cool 'splosions" meter right from the get-go. The survivors are your usual lot of deadmeats and heroes, and it's easy to figure out who's going to be which pretty early on. See, here's the problem: there's monsters on this here planet, and our characters have to figure out how to survive. Oh, there's another problem: Vin Diesel. His character, a guy named Riddick, is a killer with a heart of coal who has the one thing the group needs to survive on this planet (where, by the way, the coming night should last about a year): surgically-created super night vision. Do they trust him? Does he trust them?

So, there's your setup, and it's a great way to launch a solid 112 minutes of fun. Yes, this a movie that's supposed to mostly happen at night, but that sports an awful lot of ambient light. Yes, it's the kind of movie in which a character will flick a lighter to look around, and a strategically placed key light will snap on a split-second before the flame appears. And yes, it's the kind of movie that manages plenty of shots down the lead actress's shirt for no other reason than to remind us that yes, she is a woman. It's brainless, it's silly, and it's utterly predictable.

I'm glad I watched it.