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What are the ingredients of the best slasher films?  A masked psychopath. A sleep away camp.  The woods.  These elements have played significant roles in many of the great horror films of our time.  Think about the sleep away camp in the original Friday the 13th, and the masked villain in Scream.

Now, think about all the cheesy elements of horror films.  The gratuitous sex or making-out.  The horrible dialogue.  The girl running, and falling, while being chased in the woods.  That horrible, supposedly suspenseful music that plays every time the killer is near.

Now take the good, add it to the bad, combine that with an undeveloped back-story, and you get Darkest Hour.

Based in a Northwestern town, Darkest Hour is the story of a motley crew of strangers and friends that get together, at a sleep away camp, in the woods, for a murder mystery weekend.  There is, of course, the love triangle, the promiscuous goth girl and her whipped boyfriend, the good girl and her slutty friend, the perv and his dramatic foil, and Drieghton.  Drieghton, who wears makeup in the vein of late 70s-early 80s heavy metal rockers, is the leader of the game,.

The weekend falls on the anniversary of the “Reaper” killings that took place over a decade earlier.  It seems the Reaper was a serial killer who broke into homes and killed his victims with a sickle, all while dressed in a black cloak and where a mask eerily similar to that of the killer in Scream.
What starts out as a weekend game about death soon becomes a frightful reality when the Reaper returns, and people start disappearing, like in so many other slasher flicks.

The movie could have been good.  Better transitions, less overacting and cheesiness, and revised dialogue (do we really need to hear the F word every 5 minutes) could have gone along way to help out Darkest Hour.  As it stands now, it’s something to watch when nothing else is on.

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