Darkness Falls
Year Released: 2003Directed By: Jonathan Liebesman
Starring: Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Joshua Anderson, Grant Piro, Andrew Bayly, Sullivan Stapleton, Emily Browning, Lee Cormie
(PG-13, 85 min.)
“Call the cops!” one phantasmically beleaguered character howls, eliciting a worrying “The cops are dead!” from sleepyhead hero Kyle Walsh (Kley). Never a cop when you need one, right? There are cops on parade in this lackluster thriller, but true to B-movie form they fail to heed standard horror-movie procedurals and end up sporting non-Norelco furrows on their bloody, dead mugs, as does most of the luckless cast. A zippy opening voice-over informs us that the town of Darkness Falls has been cursed by the wraithlike spirit of a kindly old lady -- known locally as the Tooth Fairy -- who was put to death a century before when a deuce of tots turned up missing. Lynched by the irate (and as it turns out, wholly mistaken) townsfolk, she cursed the town forevermore and … stop me if you've heard this one before, Johnny Marr. Flash forward to the Eighties, and young Kyle Walsh is suffering night terrors that result in the death of his mother. He's packed off to the mental juvie ward and turns up 12 years later sporting raccoon eyes and a flashlight fetish. Childhood love-interest Caitlin Greene (Caulfield) tracks him down with the information that her little kid brother is experiencing a similar aversion to the dark. Horror ensues, but not that much -- this is a PG-13 creeper, so the gore is minimal, the editing is of the sort associated with bad acid flashbacks or nü-metal videos, and the histrionics are on high. Still, something about Darkness Falls made me smile. Maybe it was the obvious cribs from John Carpenter's The Fog and Assault of Precinct 13, or maybe it was that director Liebesman and producer/co-writer John Fasano (the brains behind Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 and -- yowza! -- Another 48 Hours) were clearly trying to avoid the standard stalk 'n' slash conventions. At its heart an old-fashioned ghost story, Darkness Falls makes fine use of the Tooth Fairy bugaboo with a series of floaty, airborne attacks rendered purely in shades of black -- you can barely tell what's going on half the time, but what you do see is effective, and the fact that this mad granny badass appears to be wearing a porcelain kabuki mask only ups the freak-ante. To his credit, Kley (Legally Blonde) plays a mean mental patient, tossing furtive glances like pennies to paupers and twitching with the best of 'em. I couldn't help thinking that the whole show would've been so much more engaging if legendary showman/producer William Castle were still around, though. Think of it: a whole horror film predicated on not going into the dark and a thousand audiences of suckers (uh, “theatregoers,” I mean) doing just that. “Scream! Scream for your life!” indeed.
Marc Savlov [2003-01-24]
