"Darkness Falls," Where shall I begin? Okay, I don't want to sound, I don't know, picky, but is it too much to ask that a horror flick have decent special effects? I'm not even asking for mind-boggling technological marvels, but "Darkness Falls" let me down in that regard. But hey, how much faith can you put in a scary movie that only is rated PG-13?
"Darkness," as you may or may not know, is essentially the story of the tooth fairy gone bad, and the film opens with a brief summary of the pixie nemesis' history. Maybe it's just me, but does the tooth fairy sound not in the least bit scary? She's just a little woman flying around with wings and a wand, and that image certainly doesn't give me the willies. Or is that Tinkerbell?I digress.
The movie begins by recapping how an old woman who used to pretend to be the tooth fairy was in a fire, was horribly scarred, could only come out at night, and thus couldn't see her beloved children. In a further tragic twist, she proceeded also to be wrongfully hung. So far so good. Incidentally, let me warn you that if you miss the first five minutes, you won't understand the rest of the movie. So if you're habitually late, like yours truly, you haven't got a chance.
To avenge her death, the tooth fairy sets a curse on a small town that we come to know as Darkness Falls. This brings me to another question: who would live in a place called Darkness Falls? If that's not asking for an untimely death, I don't know what is. That aside, everyone, including the kids in town, looked morbid and perpetually depressed. The effect is melodramatic and ridiculous and pushes the story further away from scary and even closer to laughable.
Anyway, the tooth fairy sets a curse to kill any child once he loses the last of his baby teeth. The catch? She can't come into the light to do so.
As the movie progresses, the tooth fairy visits young Kyle Watson, a recent baby teeth graduate, but kills his mother instead. Kyle is blamed for the murder and sent away for 12 years. Kyle (Chaney Kley) returns to rescue the younger brother of a friend, Caitlin (Emma Coulfield, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). The plot progresses further into absurdity when you consider that the age difference between Michael and Caitlin really makes him a liklier candidate to be her son, which would have been especially reasonable since the parents are never mentioned. At any rate, Michael, it seems, is having serious problems with the dark.
So let's recap: We have an imitation Haley Joel Osment (Lee Cormic), saying how scared he is, but this time he doesn't see dead people, but rather the tooth fairy. Like "The Sixth Sense," adults in the film are convinced that Michael and Kyle are crazy until said adults see the tooth fairy for themselves. Herein lies the problem: the opening curse only is supposed to be inflicted on kids losing the last of their baby teeth, and yet she eventually is seen by a large number of people in the town. I suppose that even the tooth fairy gets lonely, or even more likely, Jonathan Liebesman, the film's first time director, forgot or disregarded that little fact. In typical horror movie fashion, no one listens to the guy screaming, "stay in the light!" and meets some death that is meant to be horrifying but falls flat, largely because of the PG-13 content that omits the blood and internal organs.
I suppose that some people, particularly those with weak stomachs, might appreciate withholding the gore, but horror movies of this low a caliber aren't supposed to be made without at least a tiny glimpse of a severed heart or cerebrum. The potential for horror was certainly there, but Liebesman kept skirting and flirting with the real 'guts' of the issue.
Of course, another critical facet of scary movies is the music that climaxes and leaves you jumping or cowering -- depending on your personal preference -- in your seat.Does the brilliant Liebesman follow that time proven tactic? No! He instead opts to have spine-tingling music in every scene, regardless of if the scene is intended to be scary or not. This massive overuse of a hallmark of nearly all horror films left some scenes that had some potential for a scare utterly empty. Although I would be lying if I said there weren't a couple of moments that I jumped, those moments were few and far between. I laughed more than I grimaced, and even that was more at the pitiful screen writing, acting and special effects than at any actual jokes, which the movie is naturally completely devoid of, surely in an attempt to keep up the "intensity."
More amusing was the fact that everything wrong with Hollywood was not only included, but featured in this movie. To start with, all actors involved gave dull and uninspired performances, although they may not be entirely at fault, as the screenwriters didn't give them too much to work with. We are left with brilliant, innovative lines like, "I see you." The movie also resorts to Coulfield inexplicably ending up wet and running around in a tiny tank top.
One great thing about the movie was its brevity, as it was thankfully only 76 minutes long. The complete lack of substantial content left me speechless, and to continue to list the flaws would be horribly redundant when I can simply relate the following: if you can think of something that can go wrong with a movie, presume that you can find that error in "Darkness Falls."
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
