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Darkness Falls

2003, Movie, PG-13, 75 mins

Darkness Falls: Review

DARKNESS FALLS
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The children of Darkness Falls will never outgrow their night terrors: as in the similarly themed THEY (2002), scary things really are lurking in the dark. A lengthy prologue (delivered in voice-over and illustrated with ye olde sepia-toned photographs) reveals that mid-19th century Darkness Falls was home to childless Matilda Dixon, dubbed "the tooth fairy" because she gave local youngsters gold coins for their lost baby teeth. Disfigured in a house fire, she became reclusive and hid her scars behind a porcelain mask; when two children went missing, Matilda's neighbors assumed the worst and formed a lynch mob. The youngsters were later found, but Matilda had already been hanged and, with her dying breath, cursed the town. 1990: Ten-year-old Kyle (Joshua Anderson, who looks considerably older) leaves his last baby tooth for the tooth fairy, despite the local legend that anyone who sees her face will die. The tooth fairy comes, Kyle peeks, and his mother pays the price while Kyle escapes. Twelve years later: A veteran of foster care and mental hospitals, high-strung Kyle (Chaney Kley) gets a call from his childhood sweetheart, Caitlin (Emma Caulfield, of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer), whose younger brother (Lee Cormie) suffers from night terrors. His ravings about a woman who's going to kill him unless he stays in the light remind Caitlin of things Kyle said after his mother's death; would he be willing to come back to Darkness Falls and talk to the frightened child? That's the last thing psychotropic-pill popper Kyle, whose morbid fear of the dark has left him a sleep-deprived wreck, wants to do. And he hasn't been in town an hour before he's sorry he returned: The police and townspeople have him pegged as a psycho who murdered his own mother, and people start dying horribly in his vicinity. If Kyle is to get on with his life, he must confront the tooth fairy once and for all. This bare-bones scare machine is painfully slow to get going — it's half over before the two layers of backstory are out of the way. But its real problem is that Matilda Dixon, apparently conceived as a cross between the Blair Witch and Freddy Krueger, is an oddly characterless bogeyman, perhaps because she's 100 percent special effects technology with no actor underneath. The gloomy cinematography and rapid-fire editing ensure that the tooth fairy isn't overexposed, but you can't see much of anything else, either. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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