Rating: 4/10
Review date: May 24, 2003
In the town of Darkness Falls more than 150 years ago, Matilda Dixon was adored by children. Whenever one of them lost a tooth, they would bring it to her in exchange of a gold coin. But when two children didn�t come home, they blamed Matilda and hanged her but not before she laid a curse on the town.
When Kyle Walsh (Chaney Kley) lost a tooth, he was told not to peek at the Tooth Fairy who would come to pick it up. He did and the creature has been after him ever since. Now he must save his childhood sweetheart Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) and her little brother Michael (Lee Cormie) who took a peek at the Tooth Fairy as well.
This movie has a great potential to be a very enjoyable horror movie but it falls short in too many aspects which ultimately resulted in a disaster. What went wrong you ask?
The movie started off with a narration of the history of the Tooth Fairy which is quite interesting but this is the first major mistake in the sense that everything is revealed right at the beginning so there is no plot development in the later part of the movie.
What made it worse is the fact that the movie runs at only 75 minutes which doesn�t give much leeway to make the audience sympathize with the characters. Not only that, all of the characters (arguably with the exception of the two leads) killed by the Tooth Fairy are just that, people who the audience don�t give a damn about since the filmmakers obviously don�t bother to introduce them as well.
The Tooth Fairy animation is actually quite nicely done although I believe that they shouldn�t have shown the creature�s full form nearing the end of the movie. They should have just kept it �mysterious� as was done at the beginning to keep the sense of not-knowing-what-the-hell-is-that to instill fear in the audience.
The camera movements are very jerky during some scenes which really does annoy me very much because I was not able to fully register what was going on at the screen. Before you know it, whoosh � one victim is down, some jerky camera movements and whoosh � the Tooth Fairy claimed another victim.
I guess now you have the general idea of why this movie suck big time, wait a minute, need I explain the cheesy lines which are delivered by even worse acting skills? Oh well, I just said that, didn�t I?
In the end, Darkness Falls is a promising horror movie with a great back story that could have resulted in a great show. Director Jonathan Liebesman could have performed better on the various aspects that need improving with more character and plot developments as well as a longer running time or capitalize more on the �darkness� factor. The bottom line is don�t even bother with this show; I trust you will thank me afterwards if you do so or perhaps you might curse loudly (like what I did) if you refuse to listen to my advice.
Memorable quote: �You stay in the light, you stay alive.�
-Chaney Kley as Kyle Walsh-
(c) Martin Taidy 2003