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Most awful horror films provide audiences long periods of stillness on screen with scant action, which are then occasionally ruptured by short moments of bloody frenzy aimed at keeping the viewers at least minimally engaged with the film. “The Darkness” is a horror film that has long periods of time in which absolutely nothing happens and is only occasionally interrupted by short moments of pure, concentrated boredom. There are times when it feels like the producers tried to give themselves a challenge on how little it could have gotten and still satisfy the legal definition of a movie.
In the initial scenes of the movie, the seemingly content Taylor family- father Peter (Kevin Bacon), mother Bronny (Radha Mitchell) older teenage daughter Stephanie (Lucy Fry) and younger son Michael (David Mazouz) are camping with another couple the Carters (Matt Walsh and Jennifer Morrison) in the Grand Canyon. While out hiking with his sister and the Carters’ son Andrew, Michael who is autistic is left alone for a couple of minutes and falls through a concealed sinkhole into an undiscovered underground cave.
He stumbles across five strange stones of the ancient Anasazi Native American tribe that are used to trap five powerful demons. Michael is then shown escaping from the cave without anyone noticing and is lost to the viewers until the Carter family and the Taylors return to go home. The Taylors are unaware that they are in for a long, tedious, and miserable journey.
It is important to keep in mind that the Taylors is not the happiest family out there. Stephanie is bulimic, Bronny is struggling with his drinking problem, Peter is having an affair with an intern working at his architectural firm, and all of them are worried to death covering for Michael’s condition. The situation becomes worse for them when it is revealed that Michael has stepped out with the stones. The pictures are never complete with strange smells oozing out of the house, switches and faucets turning of their own accord, doors unlocking themselves, and Michael developing an array of new ‘friends’ who indulge in destructive behavior. The rest of the family takes an unusually large amount of time to comprehend the situation which has caused dark forces to take control and thank goodness they do before it is too late, calling on a pair of native American spirit cleansers to help them.
“The Darkness” was co-written and directed by Australian filmmaker Greg Mclean. He made headlines in America ten years ago for Wolf Creek, a deeply sadistic movie about a friendly man in the Aussie Outback who captures and murders three backpackers. Allegedly, it was based off a real event. According to the film’s Wiki page, “The Darkness” was also said to be based off real-life events. However, it’s so derivative that it copies “Poltergeist,” everything M. Night Shyamalan has ever directed, episodes of a Brady Bunch sitcom that featured haunted tikis and trips to the Grand Canyon, and Ben Murphy’s masterpiece, “Time Walker.” (“Being from Another Planet” for the MST3K fanatics). This is a long-winded way of saying that it would take longer to explain all the missing pieces than the latest Terrence Malick movie. Maybe all these borrowings were meant to cover the fact that the attempts at creating fear in the audience were useless. The more dramatic elements caput and the inclusion of a subplot about autism is another mystery begging the question ‘why’.
Even though I’m unsure, “The Darkness” feels like it has suffered significant post-production interference. Characters are introduced and completely vanish, plot points are brought up and ignored, and everything flows with a choppiness that implies a lot of filming was done and then either edited out at the last moment or never used. That would explain why Bacon and Mitchell would agree to work for such absurdity. It would also clarify why Mclean’s work demonstrates none of the stylistic elements of cinema that made “Wolf Creek” so remarkable. The only “scares” he manages to provide are the most basic “BOO!” moves where someone or something suddenly appearing accompanied by a loud music. This particular technique to frighten an audience can be overly effective in situations when done well (as was done in “The Conjuring”), however, here, it becomes bland and boring extremely fast.
“The Darkness” is pretty much a total bust – it’s not scary, it’s not exciting, and at the pace of a snail, it has a run time of over ninety minutes while feeling twice as long. Despite this, some aspects of the film were entertaining in my opinion. For one, the animals representing the five spirit A crow, A dog, A snake, A wolf, And a Buffalo— were supposedly the ones who haunted the stones. Since the first four showed up, I found myself at the edge of the seat anticipating the arrival of the buffalo. Later on is the strange sighting of Paul Reiser playing Kevin Bacon’s boss which makes the film, headlining all things, a partial reunion of the cast of the amazing film, “Diner.” You thought that was outrageous? I can assure you, that is an infinitely better movie than “The Darkness” and far more terrifying in comparison.
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