Film Reviews

Darkness Falls

• Rating:
• Director: Jonathan Liebesman.
• Starring: Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Lee Cormie, Grant Piro, Sullivan Stapleton, Steve Mouzakis.
• Details: US / 86 mins / (15PG).

One of those films which lays its cards on the table before the opening credits even finish, Darkness Falls begins with a voiceover telling the story of Matilda Dixon. Some 150 years ago in Darkness Falls, an idyllic New England town, Matilda's habit of giving kids gold coins for their old baby teeth earned her the name of the 'tooth fairy'. After she was grossly disfigured in a fire, a couple of nasty coincidences led to her being lynched by the townsfolk. Swearing vengeance, the old dear laid a curse on the youngsters of Darkness Falls. It's a curse which a teenage kid, Kyle Walsh, learns is true in a decent prologue to the movie. Cut to some 12 years later and Kyle (Kley) is still tortured by his experience. But he decides to go back to Darkness Falls when the brother of a teenage crush starts to suffer from equally infernal visions. Not a movie for the purists, Darkness Falls shamelessly recycles pretty much every stock horror scenario from the genre's last twenty years. To his credit, the visually dextrous director Jonathan Liebesman makes a half-hearted attempt to circumnavigate the limitations of the awful screenplay with a couple of well placed, if cheap, shocks. That's still no recommendation, though.

Review by Garreth Murphy