Post by StevePulaski on Jan 4, 2016 19:28:18 GMT -5
Darkness Falls (2003)
Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman
Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman
The Tooth Fairy turns evil in Darkness Falls.
Rating: ★½
Darkness Falls gets its name from a fictional town of Massachusetts and opens with the legend of a widow named Matilda Dixon. Matilda was a well-respected woman of her community, and gave the children gifts whenever they would lose a tooth, quickly earning the reputation as the town's "tooth fairy." Later in her life, a bad house fire horribly disfigured her face, which she went on to cover up with a porcelain mask. With that, when two young schoolchildren went missing in the town of Darkness Falls, the adults were quick to blame Matilda and wound up hanging her. Using her dying breath, Matilda put a curse on the town, and after her hanging death, the two missing schoolchildren returned home unharmed. Matilda was buried shortly after and the whole town kept it an ugly secret.
After this prologue is revealed, the film follows Kyle (Chaney Kley), who witnessed his mother's murder when it occurred and decides to return to his childhood home to see Michael (Lee Cormie), the younger brother of his love interest Caitlin (Emma Caulfield), after Michael claims he is being stalked by Kyle's mom's killer. The supernatural entity has apparently made life a living hell for both Michael and Caitlin, and Kyle seems be the only one with the potential to nullify the spirit's powers and bring an end to her murderous rampage.
Darkness Falls is as schlocky and as stupid of a horror film as you can get. At barely seventy minutes long, carrying a whomping fifteen minutes of agonizingly slow end credits in order to hurdle the film past the acceptable eighty minute mark of a feature film, it has a notably difficult time conjuring up a story, let alone explaining it, and introducing characters we must be sympathetic towards for the film's entire runtime.
This is a difficult film to watch because, while it sets up an interesting story of lasting paranormal activity and trauma in the prologue, it has a hard time iterating what exactly the spirit of Matilda Dixon is supposed to do, let alone wants, when it comes time to show Kyle and Caitlin's struggle to defeating it. Films like this, which are obviously meant to stand on their own and not carry the weight of an elaborate franchise with multiple plot-threads and storylines, need to find ways to cleanly summarize their stories and characters' intentions without getting too tied up in narrative ambiguity. Unfortunately, Darkness Falls doesn't really know the direction it wants to take with its story, nor does it really want to show us what is haunting Kyle and Caitlin or put much effort into creating a slowburn story in order for some suspense to build up.
Ultimately, it winds up being a forgettable and seriously unexciting slog through a series of cliches that only further the film into a state of artificiality, and with a PG-13 rating, there's little Darkness Falls can do to feel edgy or very horrifying in place of its threadbare and convoluted plot. The film was directed by Jonathan Liebesman, the South African man who would go on to direct the prequel to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before directing a series of action films at the dawn of the 2010's, with Battle: Los Angeles, Wrath of the Titans, and the third film reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With his track record, Liebesman feels to leave so much as a directorial imprint, or even indent, on a film that, from the get-go, feels robbed of a personality and a cogent identity, let alone a clear storyline. It's the kind of film that would've potentially worked as an artfully constructed and drawn graphic novel, but the approach it takes for the screen is completely uninspired, with no character interest and depressingly little horror etched into a story that should've dripped with fear.
Starring: Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, and Lee Cormie. Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman.