River Of Darkness

From the start I should point out I know very little about wrestling, just that it's men with a rather dubious taste in Lycra pretending to throw each other around for the sake of entertainment.  That being said I have rather enjoyed the last few wrestler starring movies I've watched; 12 Rounds, The Marine and See No Evil all produced by WWE Studios.  Alarm bells should probably have started ringing when it mentioned TNA wrestling on the box (does that make me a wrestling snob?)

The DVD box is promising; explosions, helicopters, hard man with gun... the back features a woman hung on a cross with her guts hanging out.  This ticks all the right mindless action gun toting fun we all secretly enjoy when there's nothing good on telly.

The movie begins and here's the first thing you notice it's shot in that really annoying not quite soft focus style, something that you'd expect a film student to produce because they can't get hold of better equipment.  Not proper film quality but not documentary style either, just shite to be blunt.

There's a story in there somewhere but it's so clunky and awkward I really can't be bothered to try and explain it.  I think there are three spirits, the Jacob boys, back from the dead murdering random residents of your typical American hick river town and to stop them they have to sacrifice another towns member to them for some convoluted back story reason.  These "spirits" look like this:

Dude, I thought you said we were going to a re-enactment of the final scenes from Predator!

The acting is terrible, long pauses at the end of each sentence whilst they try and remember what they are supposed to say next, it's a bit like going to the school nativity play as you're sat there willing them to continue; by my calculations if you took out those pauses the film would be at least 20 minutes shorter.  Kurt Angle is no John Cena, he's cringe worthy at times with an almost hilarious permanent facial expression of "doh!"  It appears that the majority of the rest of cast were told to be as hill billy at possible, lumber jack shirts and caps are ten a penny accompanied with a bizarre southern drawl.

Special mention has to go to Father William who was trying so hard to be Irish he must have forgotten what the Irish accent actually sounds like, it felt like he'd been left on the reserve list for Father Ted and was still bitter about it.

To sum up; it's badly shot, badly acted, badly written and just plain bad...  I've wasted my time so you don't have to, get your dose of wrestler action by watching The Condemned and hope the TNA guys go back to ironing their Lycra.