Darkness Falls

December 10, 2004

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 85 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Darkness Falls was much better than I expected, but of course I was expecting something as bad as Resident Evil, so I wasn’t that hard to impress.

Darkness Falls

Darkness Falls is a creepy retelling of the Tooth Fairy story, except in this version the tooth fairy got a bit pissed off when the local towns folk decided to lynch her so she’s been killing kids for the last 150 years. Not all kids of course, only the ones stupid enough to look out from under the covers when she comes to collect their last baby tooth. Yeah, it’s more than a little silly but in some strange way it actually works as a storyline.

The movie starts off with a classic horror movie setup, a kid in a dark room scared of something going bump in the night. And of course, this time there really is a monster lurking in the shadows. Skip ahead 12 years and we find that Kyle (Chaney Kley) is still afraid of the dark and has quite a bit of trouble trying to sleep. When his childhood girlfriends (Emma Caulfield) brother has a similar experience, Kyle returns to Darkness Falls to see if he can help.

No need to tell you more, it’s all pretty easy to guess, which isn’t always a bad thing. If you follow the horror movie formula well enough you’re certain to get a passable flick, and that’s exactly what Darkness Falls is. The special effects are quite good, the acting is.. well.. horror movie acting, and the “boo!” scenes are very effective if I can use the audience as a gauge on this.

Which brings up the audience. I must have missed something in the trailers and marketing for this movie as the theater was 95% sold out, and I was among the few adults in there. But this wasn’t just teens, this was young teens, in the 12-14 range. Not only that, there were far more girls in the theater than boys, so I was quite confused. Whatever the studio did to get those demographics slipped right by me, but they should remember it next time they market something done by Britney Spears.

One pet peeve with the marketing though when it comes to the poster. In classic horror movie fashion the ghost wears a mask to hide her “horribly disfigured face”, and we don’t get to see what she looks like till the very end of the flick. That is, unless you checked out the posted on the way in! Sheesh.

In any case, Darkness Falls is a passable horror flick, and apparently you’re safe to take your girlfriend in to see it. She’s gonna scream though, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Posted by John | Filed Under 3 Stars, Andrew Bayly, Chaney Kley, Emily Browning, Emma Caulfield, Horror, Joshua Anderson, PG-13, Theatrical