Plot:
A maintenance man is gonna lock up and secure an abandoned old people's home that has been vandalized for a long time, but something inside of the large house prevents him from doing so.
Our thoughts:
After seeing George Clarke "Splash Area" I can admit to being both interested in "The Last Light" while also expecting something lesser. "Splash Area" wasn't a terrible movie but it lost me by being silly, and that's something I figured wouldn't happen with "The Last Light". On the other hand, "The Last Light" was the earlier movie, made for a smaller budget and dealt with serious themes. It's harder to pull off in that sense, even though slashers and supernatural movies are about as common on the indieground. As I was expecting this, it came as no surprise when the movie was pretty accurate to my predictions: a more serious movie, but not as well executed.
There's only so much effort being put into supernatural horror nowadays. I don't mind that they often set us up with someone going to a house - it's perfectly fine to leave the reasons vague or simple, too. "The Last Light" has a maintenance man going to work on an abandoned old people's home. He's gonna close it up, basically. It has been ruined completely by teenagers and it's time to try and secure what's left of it. But when he wanders the corridors of this old, and frankly impressive (being an independent movie), location he is soon disturbed by something in the house. Some entity that doesn't want him to be there. The violent spirits of the house are small children.
Not a bad plot, a great location and lots of dark scenes is the highlights of this movie. There are some creepiness coming out of that alone. But it's the other things that I just couldn't get into, from the sound work to the ghosts themselves: ghost children are really frightening, but I couldn't get excited for these. Probably because it didn't work very well with tension and setting up a scare. It either just happened without us noticing (someone in the background), or came after we expected it and being underwhelming at the same time.
But again, the location is what really brought me in. I can't help but get excited from just wandering the halls of an amazing mansion like this one, and at times it was enough to just inspect the house. But you can't make a movie out of that, and the surrounding plot simply didn't grab me, so unfortunately I didn't enjoy "The Last Light".
Between "The Last Light" and "Splash Area" we have seen George Clarke tackle two of the most common horror subgenres, and perhaps even more common for indie filmmakers, so I hope he keeps his spirit up and makes another movie that deals with something a bit more new. He grew plenty between this and "Splash Area", so with that in mind he might have a few good titles in his future. It pains me to say it since George Clarke seems like a really nice guy and big horror fan, but "The Last Light" is sadly underwhelming and doesn't manage to muster up enough scares to be worth the time. Even with the very small budget in mind. |
