And Soon the Darkness

If there's one thing we've learned from bad movies, is that pretty girls traveling in foreign countries come to no good. That's repeated in And Soon the Darkness, a 2010 film directed by Marcos Efron.

It stars Amber Heard (she co-produced) and the equally stunning Odette Yustman as two young ladies on a bicycling tour of Argentina. They arrive in a small town, and the kindly proprietress of their hotel (Adriana Barazza) is aghast that they are traveling without any other company. Yustman flirts with a local man at a watering hole, and a mysterious American (Karl Urban) lurks around.

The girls miss their bus, and decide to spend the day sunbathing, which was probably the main reason for the existence of this film. They have an argument and Heard leaves Yustman behind, and she's promptly abducted. It seems that the town has a slave-ring operating which smuggles girls into Paraguay.

Unlike some films of this genre, such as Turistas, Train, or the Hostel films, And Soon the Darkness is not gory. Most of it tries to sustain simple tension, but the result is a bit of a snooze.

The film is adapted from a 1970 British film of the same title. In that instance the girls were in France. Still no love lost between those two countries.