And Soon the Darkness (1971)

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

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.

This really is a good, well made, thrilling horror-mystery. This has all the makings for a worth-while horror film: We have two women touring on their bicycles in France (which they know little about the area they are in), a weird police officer, a strange detective, secluded wooded area, chases and a mystery of a dead friend - whodunit or is she still alive? Well worth you time to watch this movie if what I have described to you sounds appealing, intriguing and you like the older suspenseful horror-thrillers as well as a mystery to solve. There is a twist ending that may not come as a big shock to you but the way it happens might surprise you just a bit.English is the main language of the film but some French is spoken - that's not a problem for the English-only speaking crowd - you'll know what is going on without subtitles.If you can find a copy of this film... I highly recommend it for viewing.9/10

Two nurses, Jane and Cathy, go on a cycling holiday through rural France. After they have been cycling for a while Cathy wants to stop and relax, but Jane wants to press on. Jane thinks that Cathy only wants to linger in the hope of meeting a man on a scooter who she had seen at various points along their journey so far. They argue, and Jane cycles on to the next village, leaving Cathy to sunbathe at a small clearing in some woods.Cathy wakes from a sleep, but becomes scared after she hears a sound in the bushes and discovers her bicycle has been vandalised. Meanwhile, Jane is disturbed by a squabbling couple at the café where she is resting, and cycles back to the woods to find her friend only to find she is no longer there. As time goes by we become convinced that Cathy is genuinely missing and we encounter various other individuals, all of whom seem suspicious to some degree: an ex-pat middle-aged Englishwoman, a gendarme, and the gendarme's deaf father.Although the pacing is fairly slow the tension is ratcheted up quite efficiently. Ultimately, however, I found the ending a bit disappointing. For much of the film the man on the scooter, who claims to be a member of the Surité, is supposedly helping Jane find Cathy, but he behaves so strangely that she becomes afraid of him and runs away. Towards the end of the film Jane finds Cathy's dead body, but the man on the scooter turns out not to be the killer and comes to her rescue at a crucial moment. However, we never get any explanation for his odd behaviour earlier on.

I've spent some time this summer trying to track down obscure horror movies from the 1970s, and this is one of the best I've encountered. I am just sick to death of modern movies which this time of year fall into one of three categories. Remakes, sequels, and comic book (or excuse me.... "graphic novels"). After scanning some old titles, this one just jumped out at me. And Soon the Darkness sounds evil and foreboding, and the film basically delivers. And of course I see it has been remade! UGGGHHHHH. No doubt that is an inferior film.Anyway, And Soon the Darkness is the story of two young English women who are bicycling through rural France, and run into some trouble. After an argument, one of them leaves the other to sun herself by the side of a county highway while she pedals to the nearest town. The more flirty of the two stays behind, hoping the handsome young man she has been flirting with that day will drive by on his little European scooter and sweep her off her feet. Well, somebody does just that, but the encounter apparently does not go well. The girl who headed for town waits and waits, but her friend never shows up to meet her. Something bad has likely happened to the other girl, but what? And which of the creepy locals had something to do with it? Maybe they all did.This is one of those films that doesn't let its lack of budget be a hindrance. It uses the wide open countryside very effectively, and it really helps the viewer understand just how vulnerable these girls are. They are easy targets that could be seem from miles away. Some of the shots show creepy-looking farmers just watching them pedal by from a distance. Much of the dialog is French, and no subtitles are provided. I couldn't even get them from my DVD player. Unless you speak French you will be just as bewildered as the girl trying to figure out if the locals know what happened to her friend. The movie is extremely well-filmed, but the ghastly soundtrack is horribly dated and seems inappropriate. Almost as bad as the soundtrack from The Legacy. The conclusion is a little too drawn-out, but the ending should be satisfying enough for anyone who can enjoy the build-up. Definitely a diamond in the rough, this film is worth 7 of 10 stars.The Hound.