Some things I liked some I did not.

Sadly Over-hyped

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

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.

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.

This is a sort of thriller that reminds us much of "Charade". Charade came first, so it gets the bragging rights.And I don't think it is a spoiler to say that, except to those who saw "Charade", and like me, they will pretty well know what is going on all the time. A\ It starts very very slow. The first 20 minutes is absolutely nothing, but at least the scenery is good. We get to see leggy women and nice country side. Had this been made in a city, and the women wore slacks, you would have fallen asleep long before the twenty minute mark.We begin in an outdoor cafe, and one woman is taking a picture. We know the camera and film will be an important cog, but it could also be a red herring.From there, the suspense is very well done. In 1970, this was not as easy to predict as today. Being easy to predict doesn't make it bad, though, not when the story line follows logic. Any other sort of outcome would have been "illogical" considering the clues. I am already risking the spoiler here, so I won't elaborate. Suffice to say, it is well thought out, well written, well done all around. I would have liked to seen a bit more energy in the first twenty minutes. The country side wasn't that pretty. Good film, and actually very believable for this genre.

And Soon the Darkness turns on a now common premise. Two young girls go out on back roads to seek the real France, only to find true danger on an isolated landscape.The film is somewhat unique in its ability to capture terror in broad daylight in a not wholly vacant surrounding. The two girls seemingly have nothing to worry about as they bike along the open roads to their next destination. The set up, though somewhat overdone in present day (and therefore mildly less powerful then it would have been in its time), creates a fairly solid foundation for a truly suspenseful ride. However, once one of the girls goes missing, the realism of the story gets thrown to the wind and some of its primary fear elements turn to frustrations hurled at the television set.While the acting is generally good, there are moments when it seems that Jane (Pamela Franklin) has completely forgotten that her friend has gone missing in the same area where another girl had been murdered not so long ago...that she is in a different country where she doesn't speak the language or know anyone...that the one man she had been confiding in now appears to be a killer. Not only that, but Jane is a reflection of an earlier model of horror victim. On the cusp of "girl power" films, Jane's only defense for the majority of the picture is to run and hide. Most notably, when Jane is in the house where Paul is breaking in, she doesn't search for a weapon. She knows where he is coming in. She has the advantage, but instead she runs on. It's an image that is somewhat hard to accept when seeing it for the first time in modern day.The true faults of the film, though, are in the actions of Paul (Sandor Eles) which never go explained. Why is her always hiding? Why does he constantly leave Jane in the dark? While I'm a fan of filling in the blanks with films, this one seems more like lackluster writing efforts than intentional mystery. For one thing, Paul must be the worst detective of all time. He destroys evidence that may have aided in bringing a killer to justice. He withholds information that could have protected Jane. He is terrible at searching trailers...how many hiding places could there really be (come on, you checked there in the last one). He doesn't see a pair of white panties on a dark ground during the day, but thinks to check under cars for missing bicycles...I find it very hard to find a film scary when the characters seems so utterly incompetent. The film does a good job of building suspense, but then you start to really not care if anyone makes it out alive. There are many others that do the same job while creating logical plot leaps, character development, and fulfilling endings. This film is not the full package.