It takes something to be the worst movie opening in a week that also offers “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Lake City” and “My Name is Bruce,” but “Dark Streets” is a rare kind of bad. Truly, it stands alone.
“My Name is Bruce” makes star-director Bruce Campbell look like Orson Welles compared to the achievement of “Dark Streets,” a musical film noir. Let us begin with the plot.
A playboy nightclub owner (Gabriel Mann, who was in a couple of the “Bourne” movies) scrambles to maintain the flashy blues palace his late father left him. He’s torn, I suppose is the word, between the star attraction (Bijou Phillips) and an enigmatic new singer (Izabella Miko).
Most of the film takes place in a small number of glitzed-up interiors, where musical numbers break out with alarming regularity. None of this resembles any place that could ever have actually existed, but I suppose the filmmakers weren’t concerned with that.
The film, mostly in its dialogue, tries to summon up the lowdown, end-of-the-night mood of a Raymond Chandler story. That mood is not supported by anything we actually see on screen, but it keeps getting repeated anyway, as though hearing words such as “The blues, man — once it’s in you, it’s got you,” will convince us.
The narration is provided by an on-screen character designed (I think) to be something like Joel Grey’s master of ceremonies in “Cabaret.” He is played by a singer-dancer named Toledo, who keeps repeating various definitions of the blues, man.
One of the measures of this movie’s incompetence is that as narrator he is in omniscient possession of all the facts, but as a character in the film he is often in the dark. Not that such fine-tuning matters much.
“Dark Streets” is produced and partly written by Glenn M. Stewart, whose biography states he spent 28 years in international finance and is now running a film development company. Sounds about right. The director is Rachel Samuels, who attempts a few Busby Berkeley-style overhead shots of spinning dancers but otherwise seems constrained by a limited budget.
Budgetary considerations can’t entirely explain away this film’s amateurish quality; it plays like a class project made by a student who’s seen a few film noir movies from the 1940s and thinks it would be fun to make one of those. This impulse should always be stopped. In the case of “Dark Streets,” it’s too late.
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