DARK STATE

DARK STATE is a political drama about a small-town reporter investigating a mysterious car accident involving her childhood friend, an up-and-coming Hollywood starlet, who survived the accident that killed an heir to a huge pharmaceutical company, a spy, and a man claiming to be an assassin-for-hire. Despite a moral worldview and an acknowledgement of God, DARK STATE has a depressing ending and is much too talky, with no real suspense or action and some strong foul language, but it envisions a global satanic conspiracy at the highest levels of government, business and the media that will ultimately fail.

After a title card warning about the Devil’s schemes and temptations, the movie begins with a strange costume party at an isolated mansion on the East Coast. The starlet, a young woman named Katie Marro, seems upset about something. She decides to leave the party and gets into a car with three men, who are driving back the nearby big city. Moments before, one of the men was wearing red devil horns.

Cut to the next day. The car involving the four people had an accident that killed the three men and put Katie into the hospital. Small-town New Jersey reporter Alicia Gazzarro wants to investigate the men who were with Katie, but her young boss, Rusty, is reluctant to assign her to it. After a stint in a big Philly paper, Alicia has had to return to her small hometown. She’s been depressed lately about her prospects, and she just missed a council meeting she was assigned to cover. She assures Rusty that she’ll do a good job with the story.

Her first day of research reveals that one of the men killed was the young heir to a billion-dollar pharmaceutical fortune, the older man driving the car was a former military intelligence leader who’s written a series of conspiracy books while co-writing THE SATANIC BIBLE, and the third man was a convicted murderer, whose sentence was commuted by Texas Governor George Bush, but who claimed to have been an assassin-for-hire.

Alicia starts to investigate how these four people ended up in the car together. She discovers that all of them were connected to a satanic cabal of globalists and media elites trying to establish a one-world government. She also finds out that her friend, the starlet, wanted to escape the cabal, even though the cabal was going to make her a star. Eventually, however, Alicia must decide whether to fight the satanic cabal or join it.

DARK STATE has a depressing ending and is too talky, with no real suspense or action. The plot is mostly a series of conversations that never get to the point of the matter until the very end. Also, the journalist never seems to be in any real danger. She only suffers vague threats. Consequently, there are no significant threats of violence until the middle of the third act. Finally, although the starlet escapes the cabal and promotes God, Truth, freedom, and morality while declaring that the Dark State ultimately will fail, the Dark State successfully overcomes other major characters.

That said, DARK STATE clearly warns against the Devil’s seductive schemes and against globalist tyranny in favor of freedom and truth. So, it has a Christian, moral, anti-totalitarian worldview. However, the positive worldview is only given verbal support in the beginning title card and in the starlet’s positive voiceover at the end. DARK STATE also contains some strong foul language, including several “f” words, two “s” words and a strong profanity. Also, there’s some light but vague sexual innuendo, and a man is shot twice, but the second shot, a kill shot, is heard offscreen one time in an unexplained flash forward and then repeated later, which shows viewers what happens. MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution for this tedious political drama.

By the way, THE SATANIC BIBLE was only written by one man, Anton LaVey, though it’s claimed by some that he “borrowed” some passages from Ayn Rand, two 16th Century occultists, an 18th Century Social Darwinist, and the 20th Century Satanist Aleister Crowley. It was written in the late 1960s when the satanic novel and movie ROSEMARY’S BABY, which featured Anton LaVey, became popular.