Eye Candy #231 - "Against the Dark" (SEAGAL! #1)

Against the Dark:  Even given the fact that most of Steven Seagal’s oeuvre is lackluster, there had to be one turd that sank to the bottom of the bowl before the rest.  “Against the Dark” is that turd.  In the very, very near future, an infection has turned giant swaths of the population into blood-craving mutants that hunt what’s left of normal humanity.  Into this mix go the Hunters, a group of vigilante humans who seek out and destroy the infected while looking for and protecting human survivors.  One such group is led by Tao (Seagal, he’s got maybe 20 lines of dialogue in the whole thing; he spends a lot of time walking, looking tough and overweight), who cuts up the infected with his sword.    He leads a group of Hunters consisting of himself, the cousin of TV’s The Rock, and two women whose only purpose is to walk around in skin tight black leather and NEVER SPEAK.  A small group of human survivors find themselves in a hospital and need to evacuate to a safe zone before the military sanitizes the area come up sun up.  Of course how they managed to all find themselves on the 4th-5th floor of the hospital apparently crawling with infected isn’t fully explained (and I have a feeling that if it was, it wouldn’t make any sense).  So the bulk of the film is spent with them going floor by floor to escape, while dodging the infected, as the Hunters enter the hospital from the other end, well, hunting.  Low production values, a terrible script, and some good actors (Linden Ashby, Keith David) phoning in performances from afar.  While I’m glad to see Seagal spending more time in the horror/gore genre, he is given barely anything to do here.  In fact, the cousin of TV’s The Rock is given more.  Woodchuck sez, “Easily the worst Seagal film I’ve seen.”