Afghan Nights (2007): A Movie Review

Afghan Nights is an adventure horror movie starring Steve Bacic as Pepper and Michael Madsen as Cooper. Pepper is haunted by the fact that he left his brother-in-law behind in Afghanistan a year ago in a military operation gone badly. With his life ruined and nothing to lose, Pepper jumps at the chance to return to Afghan to escort a civilian out. Pepper gathers a team of three army friends and heads to Afghan to retrieve the civilian. Pepper has an his own plans of trying to find his lost brother-in-law but unfortunately Cooper has his own plans of retrieving two artifacts containing the spirits of two vengeful warriors. Warning: My movie review contains plot spoilers.

This movie is pure garbage. First off, the movie try's way too hard to have a plot. The movie spends the first twenty minutes just with Pepper's back story. Yes we get that he is severely traumatized by the war and his life is crap. I got that in five minutes, the other fifteen minutes was just a waste of time. Another ten minutes was wasted gathering his friends. I wouldn't really call them friends since they had no idea Pepper was crazy but anyway, they all go along with mission because they can't resist the money. Throw in some useless banter between the guys, Cooper, and Cooper's watchdog Nash played by Gary Stretch and the movie drags on for another thirty minutes. The second problem is the movie couldn't decide what genre it was covering. I thought the movie was going to be a horror movie with undead spirits but that was like ten minutes of the movie. In reality the movie is a war buddy movie. Arrghh. I am not a fan of war buddy movies. I was deceived by the DVD box description again.

The movie also contains a pretty useless scene that made me wonder what kind of point the director was trying to make. Copper stays behind in a meeting point to wait for the guys to finish the mission. So he passes the time by getting drunk and sleeping with an afghan stripper. And he accidentally kills her so he casually buries her in the backyard. The scene was so completely unexpected and off the wall. Michael Madsen surely you are offered better scripts then this.

Finally the movie comes to an end but of course the director has wasted so much time on back story that he doesn't have time to give the movie a decent conclusive ending. So Pepper tricks Copper into climbing down into the cavern to retrieve the arrows, pulls up the rope and that is the end. Personally I would have liked to see Cooper killed at that point. And did Pepper make it to the helicopter or not?

The only good thing about the movie is Gary Stretch. His British accent is delightful to listen to and he is pretty easy on the eyes. He was my favorite character and I was quite bummed when he got eviscerated. But he wasn't enough to save the movie. It is still a piece of garbage. I give the movie 1 out of 5 stars.