Vanishing On Seventh Street

Shocking. Shit. Awful… we could leave it there but this film deserves to be slapped hard across the face and made to be locked away from innocent eyes.

I stumbled across this film whilst researching horror films made over the last couple of years. I was in the mood to watch something scary and gave this a try. I wish I hadn’t. The film isn’t anywhere near scary. It is scarily bad.

The film is set in Detroit in 2010. No one knows why but all of a sudden the power cuts out and it gets very dark. When the power comes back on everyone is gone. Well nearly everyone. A few characters remain. Believe me when I say this film would have been better if EVERYONE had fucked off. Just end it there. Two minutes in, black out, lights on, all gone, the end. That would be Oscar worthy compared to the shit they came up with.

The story basically follows four characters, each somehow surviving the initial black out and coming together in a bar they are powering by a generator that could give out at any moment, and constantly does, but then comes back. It sputters and spews the whole way through this cluster fuck of a film.

Each character has their own minor, shallow back story that the audience never really cares about and doesn’t really add anything to the film as a whole. They tick all the stereotype boxes and play the race equality card well. The main characters being a white adult male, African-American adult female, Hispanic adult male and African-American male child. Guess who dies and which character lives? That’s right they couldn’t kill of the kid! Everyone else dies. Killed, or rather, disappeared by this black shadow/ smog shit! There is no explanation of what this is or why it is here but I can forgive that as the characters you follow wouldn’t know those things.

Amazingly the young lad does survive and meets another child (who also somehow survived with no adult protection or assistance) and they meet in a church (aww subtle director’s suggestion about Christianity’s ability to save us all…)

They then find a fucking horse and wander off into the final credits! Two young kids, and I mean young, who grew up in Detroit, who have had all their family killed by some crazy body stealing black shit, know how to ride a horse? And look at the size of the fucking thing! It’s huge! How did they get up there?!

Taylor Groothius post shoot with the horse. The viewer is to believe this girl mounted this horse with the help of only a pre-pubescent city boy?! Fuck of...

 

Overall the script and storyline are both useless. The special effects are average but didn’t need to be amazing because it was just darkness!

It surprised me just how bad this film was given the surprisingly impressive cast. They had convinced Hayden Christensen (Star Wars II and III), Thandie Newton (Crash) and John Leguizamo (Ice Age) to appear in this travesty (how, I do not know) and even they could not improve this film!

John Leguizamo as Paul hallucinating during one of the many awful hallucination scenes. He couldn't die quickly enough...

Brad Anderson (Director) and Anthony Jaswinski (Writer) have a lot to answer for and owe me 92mins of my life back! It is unfortunate that a Director with credit's to his name like Anderson (Boardwalk Empire, Transiberian) chose to work with such an inexperienced writer like Jaswinski. Anderson was never going to make this film good. However he possibly made it better than it could have been. At least it wasn't straight to DVD...

 

It is awful. Do not see it. Do not look it up. Do not waste your time reading this review any further.

0.5/10 shocker!

Much love…