Review of Darkness Falls (2003) by Steve J — 06 Dec 2007

Darkness Falls is kind of nice change of pace because it goes back to the old "ghost story" model of horror. The movie starts out by telling you the story of The Tooth Fairy, a badly burned old woman who handed out gold coins in exchange for teeth. When she was wrongfully hanged after two kids turned up missing, she cursed the people of Darkness Falls.

A hundred years or so later, the story is that when a kid loses his last tooth, the Tooth Fairy comes for it. If you peek, she kills you. Not surprisingly, the kid who we see pull out his last baby tooth peeks, and the Tooth Fairy gets all kinds of evil. Luckily he's got a flashlight, and the old lady has to stay in darkness, so the Tooth Fairy kills his mother instead.

Then we jump ahead in time again to the kid's adulthood. He's now a paranoid freak who carries around a big bag of flashlights. To make matters worse, everyone suspects he killed his mother. So when his childhood girlfriend calls to tell him her little brother is having the same kind of night terrors, the guy's not exactly chomping at the bit to go back to the town where everyone thinks he's a crazed murderer.

But young love prevails and he heads back to Darkness Falls to help the kid. Of course, the little brother made the mistake of checking out the Tooth Fairy, so she's after him now. Of course, when people start turning up dead, the police suspect the crazy murderer who just got back to town. Hilarity ensues.

Darkness Falls is a very Chuck Dixony kind of movie. It's certainly not great, but it ain't bad. The acting (from Emma Caulfield and a bunch of people I've never heard of) is decent, there are some good scares, and the story sticks to its own rules. Probably the nicest thing about it is that, unlike most horror movies these days, it doesn't take too much second-guessing and brain work. You're told the story of the monster up front, and that's exactly the monster the protagonist have to deal with. No twist endings, no hidden secrets, no elaborate pranks.