Grade: B-

Verdict: Notes from the underground.

Details: A documentary directed by Marc Singer. Not rated, but there are adult themes. One hour, 24 minutes.

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Review: Here's the real urban legends movie worth checking out. And there's not a slasher in sight.

"Dark Days," which won three prizes at Sundance this year, is a most unusual documentary. Not only was it made by a young Englishman who'd never made a movie before, but it's crewed by the people who are its subjects. Namely, members of a community of homeless people who live underground in an Amtrak train tunnel stretching from 72nd Street to 125th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Filmmaker Marc Singer moved from his native England to New York and immediately found work as a model. But what he really wanted to do was direct. So he got a camera and, more importantly, found a subject. Shot over a period of two years, "Dark Days" introduces us to a half dozen or so of these denizens of the lower depths.

Singer's focus isn't on how they got there but how they manage to stay there (some have lived in the tunnel 25 years). We see the strange dailiness of their lives - how they construct makeshift homes out of discarded material; how they illegally tap into the city's electricity so they can cook, shave, even watch TV (one sly moment juxtaposes a homeless man next to a barely glimpsed "Wheel of Fortune"); how in a weird way they have replicated the basics of a community. "Hard to keep a place clean with a dog" grouses one tunnel guy, sounding for all the world like a put-upon suburbanite.

The picture's main problem is that after a point, we, well, get the point. We become inured to their half-life present, and that, almost de facto, keeps us distanced from their assorted pasts. Memories of children lost in a fire or of a 5-year-old daughter raped and mutilated lose some of their impact. We even find ourselves thinking, gee, these folks really are relatively clean and healthy. And they are. Then, we notice, so are the rats.

If nothing else, "Dark Days" reminds us how the unthinkable can assume a kind of normalcy. Near the film's end, when there is literally light at the end of their tunnel, one of them says he can hardly remember how he "let myself go like that" and he vows never to return to the "dark days" (his words) underground. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service