Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
Oh, the horror! 'Darkness Falls' is so bad, it's simply scary
Emma Caulfield, Lee Cormie and Chaney Kley in 'Darkness Falls'
Columbia Pictures
A movie a big visual thing running an hour or more must be more substantial. Even if it's a fantasy, it must be rooted in internal logic, be it "Peter Pan," "Superman" or "Catch Me If You Can."
Watching the DVD of John Carpenter's atmospheric "The Fog" (1980) a few weeks ago, I was hamstrung by the same primary objection I'd had when the film premiered 22 years earlier: Why does someone killed (however unfairly) 100 years earlier wait a whole century to extract revenge on the townspeople?
And what satisfaction is there in harming the great-great-great-grandchildren of the perpetrators? The perps are long dead, so they can't even suffer watching their descendants die prematurely.
More to the point, where was the soul or spirit of the avenger for a whole century? With God? Lucifer? In limbo or purgatory? Vegetating in a cryonics lab, waiting to be fetched by Igor?
Where?! I want to a complete, documented explanation before I drive across the county to watch one more idiot's delight like "Darkness Falls."
Having had four or five titles since going into production, it wound up being named for the town occupied by the characters, who conveniently live in a place identified with their psychological hangup.
In the prelude, we learn that kindly old Matilda Dixon, known as the Tooth Fairy, was so seriously burned in a fire more than a century ago that she wore a mask thereafter. When she was mistakenly accused of the murders of two children who turned up safe shortly thereafter she was executed.
Now she's haunting the most helpless children of Darkness Falls little boys who look like they belong on "Leave It to Beaver."
Poor little Kyle Walsh (Joshua Anderson) has to be institutionalized after being terrorized when the Tooth Fairy returned inexplicably to murder his mom.
Twelve years later, the pill-popping adult Kyle (Chaney Kley) tries to help his old girlfriend Caitlin "Cat" Greene (Emma Caulfield) calm her little brother Michael (Lee Cormie).
Like Kyle, Michael cannot bear darkness and draws gloomy black images of a masked monster.
The thoroughly irrational script by John Fasano, James Vanderbilt and Joseph Harris has barroom bully Ray (Angus Sampson) picking a fight with the long-institutionalized Kyle for the death of Kyle's mom a dozen years before. So what's Ray's problem? The murder cut off his cookie supply?
"Darkness Falls" introduces a feeble premise in the first five minutes and repeats itself from then until the end.
Director Jonathan Liebesman has nearly every scene photographed so darkly, and often with a jittery camera, that we lose sight of what's supposed to be going on and lose interest, too.
He builds to a climax at a lighthouse, ripped right from the sprockets of "The Fog." Say, you don't suppose
Windows shatter throughout. Deafening noises thump every couple of minutes, a sure sign that the director is desperate to jolt the audience but hasn't filmed a picture that can do so on its own merits.
"Darkness Falls" isn't a scary movie; it's an obstreperous sound effect posing as one.
| 'Darkness Falls' |
Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Stars: Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Grant Piro
MPAA Rating: PG-13, for terror and horror images and brief language
