Alex da Silva Friends Pamela Franklin (Jane) and Michele Dotrice (Cathy) are on a cycling holiday in rural France when they fall out. Dotrice is fed up with Franklin's strict timetable and decides to stay on and sunbathe at the edge of some wooded land alongside a road whilst Franklin continues on to the next village. She gets to a secluded café and hangs out there for a while before going back down the road for her friend. When she arrives at the wooded area, Dotrice is nowhere to be found. The film follows Franklin as she tries to find her friend. There aren't many options open to her as the landscape is one long road. You go one way…..or you go the other way….and nobody has seen Dotrice.This film is filled with tension and is pretty scary. I found myself thinking how easily this incident could actually happen. Where is her friend? Once we meet the rest of the sparse cast, we doubt everyone and are clueless as to who to trust. Even though we know that Michele Dotrice must be around somewhere because she later gets together with Frank Spencer (Mmmm…….Betty..) in British sitcom madness "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em", we definitely fear the worst for her.The cast do a good job – both lead girls deliver their dialogue realistically, especially to each other as they fall out. I found out after watching the film that Pamela Franklin played "Flora" in my favourite ghost film "The Innocents" (1961). Wow – never even crossed my mind that it was her! The only character flaw comes with the mysterious Sandor Elès (Paul) who keeps suspiciously appearing. That's not the problem – it's his manner for the end sequence which is unrealistic. He shouldn't be acting like that. But, it keeps the tension going right up to the film's end. I'd like to say that I guessed correctly, but I was never 100% sure! No gore in this, thank goodness, but a few scares and a creepy atmosphere.

jimpayne1967 I saw this film for the first time in nearly forty years recently and was surprised at how well it stood up. When I saw it as a teenager I had thought the ending a bit corny but that the first 90 minutes up to the revelation as to identity of the killer were as tense as almost any film I had seen up to that point of my life that was not called Psycho. I have seen several tenser films since that night long ago but the ending was better than I gave it credit for too.The plot is simple enough. Two young English girls are on a biking holiday round France and they have different agenda for their trip. One, Kathy, is blonde and there for a party and to meet blokes whilst the other, Jane, is more sensible and apparently intent on doing a mileage similar to that of a rider in the Tour De France. Kathy takes a fancy to a suave young man, Paul, in a café and when Paul follows the girls on his Lambretta and the girls stop for a sunbathe Kathy falls out with Jane at least partly we suspect because she hopes Paul will double back to meet her. Jane goes on for a while then returns to her friend and discovers that she has disappeared. Paul arrives on the scene, conveniently, and tells her that he is a detective. Gradually Jane comes to disbelieve him and flees to the office of the local gendarme. Paul tracks her down and she escapes his desperate, threatening attempts to speak to her. She finds Cathy's dead body, bashes Paul on the head and rushes into the arms of the gendarme and then realises that he, not Paul, is the killer. The film ends with two more girls on bikes cycling through a rain storm whilst a police car heads towards the crime scene.The film looks great, the scenes of these two attractive young women cycling through the sunlit corn fields are idyllic and the growing menace is very well done. We know something has happened but not quite what. The locals seem an increasingly bizarre lot partly because the lack of subtitles makes us identify with an increasingly anxious Jane as we have no idea if they are hostile or not. And that damn Paul keeps turning up when he shouldn't.As I watched the film again I was reminded of the later Franco-Dutch classic Spoorloos ( The Vanishing) whilst the discovery of Cathy's body is like Jamie Lee Curtis in the wardrobe near the end of the original Halloween. And Soon The Darkness lacks the psychological insights of The Vanishing and is not as genuinely scary as Carpenter's slasher masterpiece but it is well done. Paul is played by Sandor Eles who was for many of us best remembered as Mr Paul the Maitre'D in the chronically bad soap Crossroads but he is fine here and John Nettleton as the gendarme is convincing and a million miles from his affable gossipy mate of Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. The two girls are good too. Michelle Dotrice as Kathy is best remembered as Frank Spencer's wife Betty but she looks good and is credible as the slightly sillier girl whilst Pamela Franklin is terrific as she gets more and more scared.You never stop wanting her to find her friend and when she is saved at the end I breathed a sigh of relief. And Soon The Darkness is not a great film though it certainly deserves a better reputation with critics for the 'guides' who seem to have based their sniffy reviews on the synopsis and the knowledge that the director, Robert Fuest, and writers, Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, had extensive backgrounds in pot boiler British television of the sixties and seventies. Not great but worth catching.

acidburn-10 This is an eerie little 70's movie, where 2 nurses go on a cycling holiday in France, then cross paths with a strange man, then one of the girls disappear and it's up to the other one to try and find her and finding herself alone and isolated.The scenario is quite frightening where the young girl is all alone in a strange country, and that carefully builds up the atmosphere and where she learns about the local disappearances. All this takes place in the daytime which is rather different as many movies uses the nighttime to create scares and chills. Even the wooded area is very chilling when one of the girls is all alone, you straight away have the feeling that she's being watched and the fact that it doesn't show a glimpse of anyone is in fact like being trapped in a nightmare.But the pacing is rather slow and very talky and the fact that you don't know what any of the villagers are saying does get annoying. I do understand why they did it, too put the viewer in the girl's shoes, but even when she's not in the scene and just them, you still don't know what's going on. But the mystery aspect of this movie is very well crafted with several red herrings and suspects are well handled. and the scenes when she has a run in with the stranger does keep you guessing and guessing until the final climax, which wasn't entirely that satisfying and I kinda guessed the outcome of the friend.The performances were very brilliantly cast, both the young female leads Michele Dotrice and Pamela Franklin were both spot on and Sandor Eles was perfectly convincing as the mysterious stranger.All in all a very good mystery thriller, but don't go expecting anything that thrilling though as it's rather slowly paced, but had great atmoshere and tension.

gavin6942 Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) are English girls on a cycling holiday in France terrorized by a sex maniac.Written by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation and directed by Robert Fuest. Fuest does an adequate job, but his work is much better with his next two projects: the Dr. Phibes films with Vincent Price.Howard Maxford says the film has "a couple of good thrills", but is "overstretched" (the film is 99 minutes). Maxford is typically harsh on horror, but his assessment here is fairly accurate: the first would maintain a better pace if it were five minutes shorter, and the "good thrills" are few, as essentially a single English-speaking character had to carry the entire film.The film is typical of the era for Britain. Its light-hearted at times, though it does tend to get dark briefly. No outright gore, and even the "Sex maniac" aspects are pretty tame, though somewhat terrifying for the time, most likely.The film did not hold my interest as well as I had hoped, so I cannot give it a ringing endorsement. But with the release of the remake, it certainly never hurts to be aware of the source material.