By Geno McGahee
Campers getting massacred was a very popular topic in the 1980s. Jason Voorhees made a career out of killing campers, and I have to say that I enjoy it. I wish sometimes, on the rare occasions when I go camping, that somebody would take out those pricks that are blasting their music at the campground. Aren’t you supposed to get back to nature and leave all that shit behind?
DARK HERITAGE begins with a couple of campers in the middle of the woods. They begin to hear noises outside of their camper and are suddenly attacked by something. All that is shown is that whatever attacked them has dark gray hands and long fingers…creepy. It was really a great way to begin this movie.
Clint Harrison (Mark LaCour) is an investigative reporter for a newspaper and against his boss’s best wishes, he is going to try to find out exactly what happened to those campers and countless other people that have gone into that wooded area and died. Mr. Daniels (Eddie Moore) seems to have his own reasons why he doesn’t want his reporter covering this, but feels that there is nothing he can do to stop him and allows it. Clint brings a team of two other men to the area and camp out in an old mansion, owned at one time by the Dansen family. The Dansen family are a mystery themselves and some even have considered them evil or demonic, but they are a non-issue at this point.
Clint’s team (spoiler) gets wiped out by the force in the woods and the reporter is immediately a suspect, and gets a tongue lashing from Mr. Daniels, who seems to believe him but thinks that his insistence to cover this topic has caused the death of two people. Clint is now even more determined to discover what is going on, but this time he will be more prepared. Knowledge being power, he goes to the library and gets a book on the Dansen family, and that is when he is approached by two men. At this point, I was sincerely concerned that they were going to go in a threesome direction where these two guys tag-team Clint right on the library table. Thankfully it did not happen, BUT I never did see the director’s cut of this movie…so who knows?
Jack (Tim Verkaik) and Greg (David Hatcher) have been investigating the Dansen family legend and they decide to tag-team Clint on the library table…I mean they decide to team up with Clint and go back to scene of the initial crime in the camper to see if they can collectively figure out the identity of the killer(s). All three men are inside the camper, all looking out into the darkness to see if they can see something. Greg makes the mistake of sticking his head out the door. He is the next victim, having his face clawed off, and neither Jack or Clint saw a thing. They now have some more explaining to do, and have to solve this case or both will probably end up in prison, and you know what happens in prison to guys with mullets right?
Jack and Clint come up with the great idea to dig up one of the Dansen graves for some reason. When Clint asks Jack why they should do this, he booms: “Can you think of a better idea?” That was enough for Clint to agree, even though this makes no sense at all…but it turns out to be a good idea in the end. When they dig up the grave, they find an empty coffin and a tunnel underground. They follow the tunnel and then it gets really interesting.
Inside the tunnel, they come across a monster…a creepy gray zombie-ish monster with long arms and a hideous face. It’s a genuinely creepy moment. It turns out that there are tunnels all over the place and they all lead to the Dansen mansion. When Clint and Jack go to the mansion to seek this out even more, they later regret it. There isn’t one monster, there are ten or so of them and the duo cannot hide from them.
It was a great moment watching these monsters come from the holes and hobble around the house, and this film really shows that less can be more at times. They didn’t show their hand and let you sit back and learn as Clint and Jack did. I will say that this movie is not the best movie ever made. It is very slow moving at times, some of it doesn’t make sense, and the dialogue could use some work, but in the end, I enjoyed it. The monsters looked good and the story was neat. The twist at the end was pretty foreseeable but I still liked it.
Overall, DARK HERITAGE is worth a watch and I recommend it.
Scared Stiff Rating: 6.5/10. Creepy monsters and neat story overcome slow pace and low budget.
