“Stay in the light! Stay in the light!!!”
I am the last person you would want to sit next to while watching a horror flick. Especially if we’re seeing it at the big screen.
If you are paying for my movie ticket, you are wasting your money. Half of the time I don’t even watch the movie because I’m too scared to avert my eyes away from my bag of popcorn for fear that I might see something nasty. When I’m finished with the popcorn I then proceed to claw at your clothing or grab at your hand in order to calm and reassure myself that this is just a movie and that this can never happen to me in real life.
Today, I saw Darkness Falls with my mom and my sister. The title sounds a lot like that of a scary videogame, and when my sister told me what the movie is all about, the more I looked forward to seeing it.
Darkness Falls is about the spirit of Matilda Dickson, a kindly old woman, in the form of an evil, porcelain-masked Tooth Fairy. 150 years ago, Matilda was accused of kidnapping two children from the town Darkness Falls and sentenced to hang on the gallows. Her vengeful ghost is said to visit the children of Darkness Falls when they lose their last tooth, and she kills whoever sees her. However, her one weakness is that she cannot stay in the light; she can only attack you in darkness. A boy named Kyle Walsh (Chaney Kley) accidentally gets a glimpse of the Tooth Fairy when she comes to get his last tooth. Some tragedy ensues, and Kyle gets sent to a foster home far away from Darkness Falls. Twelve years later his childhood friend, Caitlin Greene (Emma Caulfield), contacts him because her kid brother Michael (Lee Cormie) refuses to go to sleep and stay in the dark. Kyle recognizes these fears as his own when he was hiding from the Tooth Fairy, and so he makes his way to Darkness Falls to help Michael.
What a very original idea, I thought. I was so sure I would like it, and during the first few minutes of Darkness Falls I almost did. The cinematography combined with some old photographs in the first few scenes gave the movie a realistic feel, misleading me into thinking that I was in for a thrilling movie that would leave me sleepless for days and with a lasting fear of the dark. But that was as good as it got. I was hoping that there would be more to the story than what happened to Kyle, but it was left at that. There wasn’t even an explanation as to why Caitlin is taking care of Michael instead of their parents, or if the cops of the town have noticed any suspicious, Tooth Fairy-related deaths. Before the first half hour of the film was over, I could tell that Darkness Falls is nothing more than a popcorn flick. After Kyle arrived in town, it was as if the producers and directors grew lazy because the plot grew paper-thin and the suspense stopped building up. What happened is that every five minutes, the Tooth Fairy would come out, say “Boo!”, and then kill someone. That got boring after a while; jump scares are so cheesy. The characters were flat and uninteresting, and those who died had zero character development, leaving me with no feelings of remorse for their deaths.
As for the acting, it was pretty bad, and so was the severely underwritten script. I thought that Chaney Kley’s good looks might entertain me even if the movie couldn’t, but after he said, “Stay in the light! Stay in the light!” for the fiftieth time I felt like strangling him. Because of Kyle’s fear for the Tooth Fairy, he carried a bag-full of flashlights with him all the time, but I noticed that not once did he use any of them. Lee Cormie’s character struck me as a little creepy; when was the last time you met a kid who talked like an adult? But in fairness, Lee was probably the best actor in the entire movie. The frightened look in his face was convincing enough, which must have been a little hard to do since he had to be scared throughout the entire movie. I’ve heard that Emma Caulfield was a good actress at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she was bad at Darkness Falls. There’s something off about her acting like a warm, protective older sister.
Darkness Falls is also chock-full of every single horror movie cliché I could think of. Unearthly wailing and groaning. Creepy drawings done by the frightened child. Bloody deaths and gruesome dead bodies. Cat jumping out of the bushes and startling one character. I suppose the only redeeming factor Darkness Falls has is that it is the kind of crappy movie that is amusing to a certain degree. Not so much because of the plot or the characters but because it’s so bad, you just can’t help but laugh at it.
And if you’re anything like me, a nervous person who can’t stay alone in a pitch-black room for more than five seconds, then this movie will make you shriek and jump into the arms of the person sitting next to you. It’s the perfect excuse to get touchy-feely with your significant other in the darkness of the movie theater. But then again, you’d probably be better off making out to something romantic than spending money on such a crappy film.
