This dull, vapid and tired old thriller creaks along at a snail's pace for eighty minutes and then asks the audience to jump with the "surprise" revelation of the film's most unlikely character as a murderer. Veteran drive-in director Robert Fuest and his two scripters, Terry Nation and Brian Clemens, probably thought it ingenious to set this tale of a sex maniac stalking two young nurses (Pamela Franklin, Michele Dotrice) in the sunny, open and underpopulated French countryside, thus defying horror movie conventions. But that choice works against the picture: the audience can only stand so many ten-minute takes of empty agrarian vistas and through-the-forest tracking shots without payoffs before throwing up its hands in disgust. If there is a way to riddle this atmosphere with suspense, Fuest, Nation and Clemens don't find it. One consistently hopes, given the premise and setting, that the filmmakers will manage to create and sustain an ambience similar to the one in the first act of Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain, but that never happens - not even for a second. Resident heroine Franklin, with her constant whiny protests and cries of help, is utterly grating - ten minutes with this character and you'd want to strangle and off her as well; blonde Dotrice (whatever became of her?) is sexy, bubbly and talented but significantly underused. Danny Peary wrote memorably of the film, "Most often this movie shows up on the late late show with the strongest sex and violence excised." Wrong: the uncensored film is rated PG - a very soft PG - with precious little sex and violence in sight. One wishes that Fuest and co. had added some grisly violence or kinky sex to spice things up - that's how desperate this picture makes one feel. And while Peary's comment about the "late late show" is technically accurate - a glance at the New York Times index indicates that it cropped up ten or twelve times on local Manhattan stations during the mid-late '70s and early '80s, almost always after 11pm - it misleadingly imparts And Soon the Darkness with a kind of "night owl" mythos that it absolutely does not deserve. Looking for raw suspense involving a relentless maniac? Skip this stinker and try The Silent Partner instead.