Vanishing on 7th Street – Review

Horror films were cathartic for me as a child because I had a major fear of the dark and my strange way of dealing with it was facing them head on. It was badge of honor for me to test my limits. I remember living in an apartment and not wanting to walk down the corridor to my room because is seemed to go on forever, and it did not help that we had a mirror tacked to a wall at the end of the hall that seemed to be held up by the murkiness that surrounded it. My family told me stories about how at our prior house that they used to hear voices coming from the heater in the floor. Suffice to say, I have a soft spot for the unknown and things that go bump in the night.

Four ordinary people go about their everyday lives and are thrust into the unknown by shadowy figures that with a single touch will make you part of the other side. Humanity has been wiped clean as empty cars litter the streets, clothes are strewn with no bodies in site, and the days are getting shorter and the nights longer. Luke [Hayden Christensen], Paul [John Leguizamo], Rosemary [Thandie Newton], and James [Jacob Latimore] seem to be the lone survivors as they find their way to an empty tavern to hole up and figure out what to do next. Like anyone would do in these situations, they spend most of their time quarreling about the root of the evil entities and what is the best way to survive. What works best is light, although not illuminations coming from an alternate source, but the one that you control yourself. The temptation of seeing missing loved ones is what is keeping them going, and the spectral energy knows this and uses their hope of finding them as a tool against them.

Anthony Jaswinski’s screenplay is paying homage to a couple of great pieces of hallowed work. It is fairly obvious that The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough to Last” was a huge inspiration. Burgess Meredith played a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world. There is even a shot of Hayden Christensen, who is just as wooden as a plank here as he was in the Stars Wars prequels, stepping on a pair of glasses and breaking them. The crossroads of 7th Street is Seal Avenue, which is a wink to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a film about a man who plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.

Realizing cars will not start and that they are running low on fuel for the generator that is supplying them the light that is keeping them alive, our tetralogy of knuckleheads spend most of the movie arguing about what to do next and boring the audience in the process. Instead of making a run for the outside world, they could have used what was left of the gas and caught the bar on fire. I would not have lasted long, but it would have kept them alive a lot longer. Maybe they could have started bonfires with the endless supply of paper left in the world. And do not getting me started about how much light you actually need to ward off the boogeymen. I can understand flashlights doing the job, but are you telling me that those little glowsticks kids wave at concerts work? Or how about those shoes that children wear that blink when you walk? Yes, those are far from bright light worthy, yet they work here to keep evil afar. It is these kinds of lapses of logic and talky dialogue that almost made me stop watching the AMC series The Walking Dead. I do not want a Soap Opera – I want to be scared!

Vanishing on 7th Street looks like a million bucks thanks to director Brad Anderson, who can make someone striking up a cigarette look like a thing of beauty. The Michael Mann of B-movies has taken a huge leap backward as he tries his darnedest to shine a turd, and ends up making a picture that was supposed to make me forget about Darkness Falls and They, as opposed to wanting to give them another shot.

Rating: