Hey folks, Harry here... Before Capone took a steaming pile of crap on DARKNESS FALLS, I was actually very much looking forward to it. The very early advance screenings yielded very good word of mouth... HOWEVER, after those screenings, they did massive changes in terms of the special effects and monster designs... is it possible that they lost their movie by beefing up the effects? I don't know. I'll still see it, but my expectations have just been lowered into the subway...
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here with the first of what I'm sure will be many attempts to make me pee my pants in fear. The ol' boxers feel pretty dry to me.
The oft-repeated warning given throughout DARKNESS FALLS is “Stay in the light.” Lord, I wish I’d done just that rather than plunge myself into the shadows dimly-lit theatre to sit through this generic, largely scare-free and bloodless, PG-13-rated dump of a film. I’m not necessarily saying that a PG-13 film can’t be scary (two of the scariest films in the last two years--THE RING and THE HOURS--were both PG-13), but DARKNESS FALLS fails at every level. I’m sure it will make a killing at the box office.
The film actually begins with some promise: an elegantly edited montage of images fills the screen as we hear an unseen narrator tell us the tale from many years ago, when children living in Darkness Falls would bring their removed baby teeth to an friendly old woman in town. Folks called her the Tooth Fairy. One day, a terrible fire disfigured her and she took to wearing a porcelain mask so as not to scare the kiddies. Not long after, two children who were last seen in her company disappeared. She was strung up by the townspeople, and just before she died she put a curse on the town, saying that on the evening when a child loses his/her last baby tooth, the Tooth Fairy would come from the great beyond, snatch them up, and kill them. What’s next, a machete-wielding Easter Bunny?
Flash ahead to a scene with young Kyle and young Cat, a couple of barely teenage kids, lifelong friends who will clearly one day fall in love. Kyle has just lost his last baby tooth, and he’s a little nervous. After Kyle asks Cat to a school dance and Kyle goes to bed, sure enough, the Tooth Fairy--a flying, white-faced spectre--makes and appearance, but Kyle is too clever and the Fairy end up killing his mother. Kyle is blamed for the crime and is sent away to a mental hospital for many years.
Up to this point, the film still had my attention. Flash ahead some more, to the present day. Cat (now played by Emma Caulfield) and Kyle (Chaney Kley) haven’t seen each other since that fateful day in Darkness Falls. She calls him for help because her little brother, Michael (Lee Cormie), is having night terrors and is deathly afraid of falling asleep. Turns out Kyle hasn’t done much sleeping either since leaving town, but he has learned a few tricks about how to keep the Tooth Fairy at bay. Nearly the second Kyle gets back to DARKNESS FALLS, all hell brakes loose. You see, the Tooth Fairy isn’t one of these one-at-a-time kind of killers. She attacks an entire police station at one point. Apparently she’s also “allergic” to light, so as long as the lights and electricity stay working, there are places to escape to. Anyone who saw PITCH BLACK knows how this works.
One big problem I had with DARKNESS FALLS is the cast. Nobody appears to care about anything that’s going on. I realize that half the characters are supposed to be sleep-deprived, but come on! Monotone delivery, slumped shoulders, and bored expressions seems to be the status quo for the townspeople. Except for Emma Caulfield, I’m guessing I’ll never hear from any of these lame actors again. The other problem I had with the movie was that the rules kept changing, and that’s a big no-no in my book. The definition of “light” was never clear. Sometimes it seemed the Tooth Fairy was well-lit and doing okay; other times she was burning like a vampire at sunrise. I also never quite understood why the townspeople found the Tooth Fairy phenomenon so difficult to accept. Hadn’t this been going on for decades before we got involved, before any of these characters were even born? But the biggest problem I had with DARKNESS FALLS is that it’s just not that scary. They use every trick in the book to manufacture suspense and scares without actually taking the time to set a mood and build tension. There is actually a scene where Cat is sitting in a car in an empty parking lot, and a black cat jumps on the hood of her car. Where the hell did that cat come from, how did it get up high enough to jump down onto the car, and how the hell didn’t she see it coming? Director Jonathan Liebesman comes across as just plain lazy when he resorts to cheap scare tactics like this. In a word, DARKNESS FALLS is lame.
Capone
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