You can't expect that your camera will perform well in dark area's, even with camera's which are know for their good low light performance (the vx2100 f.i.) you will always get noise in your image. Especially small handycams are not good lowlight performers.
I think that every serious "film"maker will advise you to use extra light in all circumstances. It's often even better to use too much light so you have more possibilities in post to correct the image, everything also depends on what you want to achieve, higher end cameras have more manual control which let you tweak almost every aspect of your image when you shoot. With low-end camera's the only option you have is to assure the lighting is good if you don't want to end up with "vhs" like images.