Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A Major Disappointment

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

This movie was obviously made on a very small budget that was probably spent mostly on digital cameras, fake blood and all the cans of beer the characters drink in one of the first scenes, Darkest Day is a plucky if hardly original British zombie film. Like so many other films and TV shows involving an undead menace, it focuses on the group dynamic among a group of so-far uninfected strangers, although this iteration goes somewhat against convention by having all the survivors be students in their twenties instead of a more heterogeneous mix of ages and types. This project was overall very decent and had good dialogue. Nevertheless, bits of it, like the editing, are pretty great, and the use of Brighton and the South Downs makes for a refreshing change of location.

The poster for "Darkest Day" says it all - "British Zombie Horror at its best" - if this is a separate genre then there's no hope at all!The movie blatantly rips-off 28 days movies - the main character awakes after an apocalypse with no memory of what has happened or how he got there. It's so blatant I can't believe the movie was green-lighted - but then again looking at the credits it seems to be a vanity/conceit piece for the main actor (who I think is the director too). This explains why the main actor is soooo wooden and the directing total crap.Characters seem to behave in unpredictable and unlikely ways, stare at the camera, overact or underact and are essentially unbelievable.There is an amazingly ineffective army, an amazingly over-effective character who single-handedly beats up a whole hoard of zombies, dumb characters who get over the death of their friends and family in a heartbeat, and loads of really bad special effects. A character also seems to die from a broken arm for some reason...At the end the main character kills himself for no real reason - I only wish he'd saved us all the time and done it in the first scene of this turd of a movie.

This is a blow by blow review though the first hour is basically the silliest 'fast zombie' movie I've ever seen. The protagonist, who is barely 20 and has a weak, slender build later manages to overpower a soldier armed with an l86(a2?), that's right, he manages to push the barrel up, disarm the soldier (who I'd assume is spec ops and would instantly go for his sidearm or knife), wrestle him to the floor (despite being about half his weight) then strangle him to death then strangle him to death, then runs off ignoring the fact that there's a rifle and lying on the floor right beside him. To summarise the first hour of the movie, this boy (and I mean it when I say it) wakes up on a beach with amnesia (overused) and runs after two people, he shouts for them to wait and despite the infected only really screaming comically running in this the guy out of the two attacks him anyway and then subsequently gets killed. He and the girlfriend? Of dead guy run back to a house filled with hipsters and one self proclaimed hard lad who won't shut up about his biceps. Eventually his (sister? seriously none of this is telegraphed at all to the audience, you're left to assume and hope you're right) somehow (maybe I'll find out in the last half hour of this movie) gets infected and after being taped up, then freed by her brother? Runs around the house trying to kill everyone until they throw her out a window. Now the option of leaving the city and going out to a house in the country (rather than sitting drinking beer until you pass out while playing nice loud music in the middle of a zombie infested city, throwing food at each other and generally getting on like zombie food rather than 'survivors') was on the table in the first 20 minutes but "it's a bit of a hike" despite the roads being filled with cars the only time they leave the house is when they're starving, to go to a supermarket half a mile away when there are houses all around for looting, even when the protagonist takes a rucksack of food off a random dead girl he's scolded with "don't do that, it isn't right" well gee, not like it's zombie apocalypse. It's also worth mentioning that the cameraman is terrible and doesn't seem to understand depth of field, for example; when two people are talking one will be in focus and the other will be horribly blurry. Maybe they wanted this 'unique art- style' but you use depth of field to isolate a character or characters, when there's a dialogue of two people, both should be in focus. So, the hipster squad; chased by a wholly inept military who decide to use a sonic device to lure the zombies out to chase the hipster team down (yet don't seem to use any military tactics like staggered reloads so everyone ends up out of ammo at the same time) or on their fallback position they hadn't rigged any clay more (this whole spelling correction thing drives me crazy when using actual words!) mines prior so naturally the soldier's 'cunning plan' (reminds me of the 'cunning plans' in Blackadder) completely backfires and most, if not all of them get eaten, when they could have just fallen back and flipped a switch. They have Chinooks, they have some expensive sonic zombie horde truck but not basic training or tactics; it's like they were made stupid on purpose, which is probably the case because they're outsmarted by 19-25 year old's at every corner, none with any sort of survival training. Even when the hipster squad decides to light a fire and stay outside for the night all of them go to sleep instead of setting watch schedules. Personally they'd be dead 10 times over if they weren't so amazingly 'lucky'. As well as that, even though the military have choppers, amazing sonic technology zombie horde trucks; they don't seem to have any sort of IR camera (which you can buy as an add-on for your phone for gods sake!) as you could pick up a group of hikers and differentiate from zombies on high res IR rather easy.Yet another one of the hipster squad has died, from a half amputated hand; something that bears mentioning is that the hipster squad don't know how the virus spreads and seem to be immune so at worst this one guy would lose his hand, not his life. It just seems like the developers are throwing twists in to 'make it interesting', sadly this isn't working, it just makes the film seem sillier and sillier as I watch it. The skinny protagonist decides to split up from the hipster squad, surrenders to a soldier as he was given a prototype vaccine and may still be an infected carrier blah blah same old BS is on the ground, still manages to overpower another spec ops soldier; again ignores his rifle and then as the hipster squad magically arrive at their country house he manages to magically tel-e port (Good job spelling correct, maybe you should pick up a dictionary; both clay (no space) more and tel-e (no space, no hyphen) port will be in it, or you know; since reviews are moderated allow 'spelling mistakes' if someone check-boxes them and penalise users who abuse that system) to the beach where he started out, despite it being a two days walk. On this beach he sits down, contemplates life and then walks into the water (with no stones in his pockets) until he is completely submerged, apparently killing himself, when he could have just been shot in the head literally one and a half 'film minutes' ago. Cut to credits.I want my hour and a half back, this film is a terrible copy of 28 days later with a bit of a twist.

Oh a zombie apocalypse ! Just what the world needs - not . You can understand why they're popular with low to no budget film makers because all it needs to take one is a small handful of extras , a quiet morning to film on some deserted streets and you've got a movie , one that you've probably seen a dozen times and were probably bored by the second , third or fourth time So what's so different about this one ? you may ask and in reply all I can say is not much at all . If you've seen Boyle and Garland's 28 DAYS / WEEKS LATER there's very little new here . In fact the story starts with a young man waking up on a beach and the entire early segment is structured exactly like the beginning of Boyle's film on a mis en scene level except it's set in Brighton instead of London . Even the music is similar to 28DL . The only time the film goes its own way is in an inferior manner where the uninfected do illogical things like have a house party ! I know Brighton has a reputation for hedonism but this is too much on a credibility level . It also copies the illogical plot turns of 28 DL where a wimpish middle class student is able to kill battle hardened squaddies with his bare hands . I know Britain's military reputation has plummeted after Iraq and Afghanistan but you'd think a soldier would get the better of a student once in a while Searching on the internet I found out DARKEST DAY cost less than £1,000 to make , was shot over a long period of time . In other words it's a labour of love Unfortunately as an audience member I am under no obligation to love any film . It might have worked better if it had a bigger budget , a more developed screenplay and a better cast but you could say that about most films that aren't Hollywood blockbusters