Main cast: Chaney Kley (Kyle Walsh), Emma Caulfield (Caitlin ‘Cat’ Greene), Lee Cormie (Michael Greene), Grant Piro (Larry Fleishman), and Sullivan Stapleton (Officer Matt Henry)
Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Well, I guess that’s it. Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t that good an actress after all. Monotonous acting and formulaic horror movie twists and turns make Darkness Falls truly scary in how boring an expensive big-budgeted scary movie can somehow be. Besides, this movie is about an evil tooth fairy. I mean, yes, really. Maybe the sequel will be about Santa on a killing spree using a giant candy cane most creatively on naughty little boys and girls.
Legend has it that the real curse of the New England town of Darkness Falls is that a long time ago, idiot parents hanged a kindly old woman because they thought that she was behind the sinister fate of two missing kids. Poor Matilda, all she wanted to do was to be nice to kids and play the tooth fairy. I guess she could put her time to better use like growing pumpkins or something, but hey, who am I to say?
Today, if a kid loses his or her baby teeth, the evil version of Matilda will fly down cackling and all to cause lots of pain and mayhem. A childhood brush with this hag caused poor Kyle Walsh to grow up into a Fox-Mulder type of guy, only more freaky and minus the sex mojo. When his childhood friend Caitlin calls him to see what is wrong with her brother Michael, he and Cat soon realize that you don’t mess with the Tooth Fairy. She’s ugly, she’s mean, and she will steal all your teeth.
In this movie, light is the only thing that will stop Evil Matilda. Oops, what happened to the light? Ugh, why is his torch so useless that it just dies out when Mattie is a-coming? Maybe we should all chip in for Energizer batteries. Oops, someone is making scary sounds – that means someone is dying. Oops! She accidentally crashes open some grill. Anyone scared?
Emma Caulfield is beyond robotic – it seems as if they have sedated her to the gills. The kid, Michael, is so obviously reading out his grown-up speak from a signboard held by his stage parents from outside the screen range. Kyle is the only guy who seems to resemble a living human being here.
I don’t know how to describe it, but this movie is so predictable and hackneyed that there is nothing really scary about its overusing the familiar bag of tricks in the horror genre. Even the penultimate scene where Crazy Matilda is unmasked is more derisive than creepy.
Bad acting and bad plot should be the hallmark of a bad campy horror movie. But Darkness Falls somehow manage to deliver the bad parts without redeeming itself by offering any camp value at the same time. How dull, unfortunately.
