Film Review: Darkness Falls (2003)

History of film often looks like history of injustices. Many classics have failed at the box office, ruining their talented makers’ careers and reputations, while many undeserving films succeeded at the box office, like Darkness Falls, 2003 horror film directed by Jonathan Liebesman.

The plot of the film is set in small town of Darkness Falls. It is a charming and idyllic place, with only dark shadow being macabre legend of the elderly ghostlike woman named Matilda Dixon a.k.a. Tooth Fairy which visits children when they lose baby teeth. Protagonist, played by Chaney Kley, is Kenny Walsh, young man who, as a boy, learned that the legend was real in the worst possible way. He saw Tooth Fairy kill his mother, an incident for which himself was blamed and spent great deal of youth in psychiatric institutions. Years later Kyle is asked by his childhood friend Caitlin Greene (played by Emma Caulfield) to help her younger brother Michael (played by Lee Cormie) who apparently had visions of Tooth Fairy. He reluctantly returns to Darkness Falls, which soon becomes sight of unexplained murders. It turns out the Tooth Fairy has a grudge against the citizens that took her life a century and half ago. Kyle must help Caitlin and Michael and find a way to defeat murderous ghost. It includes exposing Tooth Fairy to light, but this proves to be difficult.

Concept behind Darkness Falls is hardly original and the fans of The X-Files could easily recognise it as being used in early eponymous episode in the series. The concept was, in even better way, used by 2000 science fiction film Pitch Black. Script in this film, however, doesn’t do much with it and the audience is left with the poor excuse for cheap scares, some cheesy special effects and characters who use every opportunity to act as idiots simply in order to prolong the plot. Darkness Falls represented feature debut for South African director Jonathan Liebesman. He, by his own admission, didn’t have much fondness for the script or the genre itself and took the job merely as as springboard for Hollywood career. The result is utterly bad and forgettable film made with almost deliberate lack of effort, with 10 minutes of credits used only to increase the running time to standard hour and half. Darkness Falls, however, worked at the box office, with its relatively low budget and lack of comptetition films in January 2003 distribution slot making it profitable. Liebesman later did number of interesting films, but this isn’t reason enough why should anyone bother to spend precious time on Darkness Falls.

RATING: 2/10 (-)

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