The new thriller Darkness Falls has two things going for it: It's mercifully short [less than an hour and a half] and it features the classic line, "Your first kiss shouldn't taste like blood."
Beyond that, the film has zero redeeming merits. It's not even in the So-Bad-It's-Good category, reserved for movies like Patrick Swayze's Road House -- movies that are terrible, but still entertaining.
Darkness Falls is about a killer Tooth Fairy. Yes, you read that right. Clearly the slasher genre is desperate for new villains; we've already seen one movie featuring a killer pumpkin and another with a malevolent leprechaun. What's next, hatchet-wielding Care Bears?
The movie opens with a sequence in which a preteen boy, Kyle, loses his final baby tooth. This is not a positive development for him because he lives in a town haunted by the Tooth Fairy. He goes to bed warily and she soon arrives on the scene, looking like the Wicked Witch of the West wearing a Jason Vorhees hockey mask.
Kyle rushes screaming out of his bedroom into the comforting arms of his mother who tries to reassure him. She walks down the dark hallway to check the kid's room, not bothering to switch on any lights of course, and the Tooth Fairy slaughters her.
The movie later explains that light will kill the Tooth Fairy. Kyle's mother couldn't turn on any lights when she went to investigate his room because the Tooth Fairy would have been vaporized and the movie would have been over after the first scene. That would have been nice.
...Fast-forward 12 years. Kyle [Chaney Kley] is grown but the Tooth Fairy still chases him around at night. He carries around a bag of flashlights to ward her off. Kyle's grade school girlfriend Caitlin [Emma Caulfield] is also grown. She is looking after her younger brother, Michael [Lee Cormie], who is at least 15 years younger than she is [Go Viagra!] and who is also being haunted by the Tooth Fairy.
The movie never explains why the Tooth Fairy pursues only these two and no one else in town. But that doesn't matter since it gives up on plot in favor of violent, nonsensical action about a third of the way in.
None of this is really scary either. The filmmakers lack the skill or the patience to create true fear in us. Instead they try to shock us with quick, cutting, brutal violence and pounding chords on the soundtrack. The movie grimly employs every horror cliché in the genre, including the old standby of tightly framing characters so that the audience can't see anything that might jump in from off-screen.
It also features:
- A hospital with expensive brain scanning equipment but no backup generator.
- A local bar that opens up into the middle of thick woods, so that characters can quickly and conveniently get lost and become Tooth Fairy victims.
- A dim local sheriff who nevertheless has extensive knowledge of pharmacology.
- A movie town that has a towering forest on one border and rolling seas on another. I kept waiting for a third side of the town to open up onto either vast savannah grassland or a glacial shelf.
I have no problem in principle with horror movies, with B movies, or even with silly movies with dumb plots. Last year's excellent Signs was a B movie with a preposterous plot. The difference between Signs and a movie like Darkness Falls was that Signs was rendered with a sense of style and affection for its B movie origins. Also, the filmmakers made us care about the characters so that we really feared for them when they were in peril.
Darkness Falls doesn't make us care about anything. It is crass, cynical, and exploitative. It is incompetently directed and edited. The special effects are terrible. It is meant for a new generation of young moviegoers who lack theater decorum, who talk incessantly throughout movies, and who have grown up on the rapid editing of MTV and the thoughtless violence of video games.
I can decry this movie for the piece of shit that it is, but for many who want to see it, neither my words nor any idea of aesthetic standards will dissuade them.
And yet, if I reach just one person and save him or her 90 minutes of precious life, then it's all worth it.
Reach the reporter at michael.b.green@asu.edu.
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Darkness Falls
Starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield and Lee Cormie. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Opens tomorrow. |
(out of four)
