I'm Not Afraid Of The Dark...

Having already seen The Chronicles of Riddick, I went ahead and rented Pitch Black. I went and saw Riddick in the theater and thought it was a decent middle-of-the-road sci-fi movie and since the pickings at Blockbuster have been mighty slim lately, I figured that Pitch Black would be a good choice and would clue me in to the story leading up to Riddick.

Anyway, let's start off with the main man -- Vin Diesel. I'd sleep with him, I guess, but he's really not high on my list. If you're going for the big, muscled, shaved-head type, I'd choose GeekSlut over Vin any day of the week... (GeekSlut has this underlying nice guy vibe, which is the antithesis of the whole Vin Diesel draw...)

I was rather surprised to find that Claudia Black of Farscape fame was in this movie. She's definitely one of my favorites and I've seen her pop up in unexpected places -- I was watching an episode of Beastmaster she was in and I kept waiting for D'Argo and Crichton to pop up any minute. The next thing I know, the actor who plays D'Argo shows up in the episode. Unfortunately, there was no Ben Browder in either Pitch Black or Beastmaster. While I'd like to be able to say that I ended up having erotic dreams about Browder, ala Adam, I was not that fortunate. I was also disappointed that Claudia's character was killed off about halfway through the movie. Of course, it was nothing personal -- it's just that kind of movie.

Anyway, the whole story of this movie is that a group of travellers crash lands on this deserted planet and must get off before they are eaten by a bunch of hungry critters that can only come out in the dark. The kicker is that the planet is headed for one big solar eclipse. The hungry critters struck me as a big ripoff of Alien...

At the core of both Pitch Black and Riddick is the basic idea of the anti-hero-- someone who we normally consider the bad guy, but we end up rooting for anyway. I'll admit that while its occasionally amusing to see flawed, hypocritical characters get their comeuppence at Riddick's hands, on the whole, generally, I just can't get into the whole anti-hero thing. The whole "I'm a badass and I'm gonna fuck you up" attitude is a big turnoff for me. A guess, when you get to the bottom of things, I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys and I'd rather cheer for one of us.