Review #275: Darkness Falls (2003)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #29 - Darkness Falls (2003)

Darkness Falls revolves around the eponymous town of the same name, where a folk tale about the "tooth fairy" (a local woman who would reward children for losing their baby teeth) turned sinister when some children went missing and the woman was suspected of taking them. A posse caught and killed her (right before the children returned unharmed), leaving her angry spirit to take vengeance. The protagonist is Kyle, whose mother was killed by the evil tooth fairy ghost when he was a kid, and now that he's grown up he has to help his childhood friend Caitlin and her family escape from this evil force.

The first thing that jumps out at me as being odd in this movie is that a large part of the plot is Kyle trying to stop Caitlin's brother Michael from being haunted/killed by the evil ghost tooth fairy. It's bizarre to me because the actor playing Michael is twenty years younger than the actress playing Caitlin (and the difference is quite big, it's a 30-ish sister and a 10-ish brother). It REALLY felt like it was written to be her son, and I still can't tell why they cast such a young actor if it was indeed supposed to be her brother.

Also, the evil ghost tooth fairy really doesn't make sense as a monster. Why did it go after Kyle and Michael when they lost their baby teeth, but nobody else in town seemed to be in danger when they lost theirs? (If it were some rite of passage all children in town had to go through that would be one thing, but nobody believes Kyle when he talks about it, implying that he's the only person who ever was terrorized by this ghost until Michael came along.) The ghost doesn't seem to haunt a specific location (there's the scene where Caitlin's husband tries to drive Kyle out of town and it shows up to kill the husband, even though he's a grown adult with presumably no baby teeth to speak of). There just seems to be no rhyme or reason for who the ghost will try to kill, why it's killing the people it kills, where it's going to show up, why it's here now but not last year or the ten years previous, and so on. Also, in some scenes the ghost is a physical person that has to run up and attack you, and other scenes simply stepping into darkness can injure or kill you. Sometimes light hurts the ghost, sometimes it doesn't. There really is no consistency whatsoever, the ghost does whatever the plot needs of it at any time.

Also, so much of the tension comes from the fact that when Kyle was a child, his mother was killed by the ghost (again, no idea why) and the whole town thinks Kyle killed her instead. Tell me, which is more likely- that a child (young enough to have just lost his last baby tooth) overpowered and brutally murdered his mother while leaving no forensic evidence that he did it, or that- in the case nobody wants to hypothesize about an evil ghost tooth fairy- literally anybody else broke in and killed her instead? I would love to know what sort of investigation led to Kyle being suspected of his mother's death, but the movie conveniently skips ahead twelve years and just says, "They all suspected him, trust us, it's totally reasonable".

In the end this was just an incredibly forgettable movie, with little thought put into the plot or characters. I really do have to wonder if this whole movie came about because someone was between bong rips and said, "What if the tooth fairy was evil" and they didn't have the writing chops to actually make something out of that- or perhaps this was written as a completely different film, and someone had to hack and slice out huge chunks of necessary script pages in order to fit it into the "what if tooth fairy evil" framework their studio imposed on them.

We may never know.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Broken Ghost Masks

By Hook or By Crook: This movie has a whopping ELEVEN MINUTES of credits, likely because without them, the runtime would have only been 74 minutes, much too short for a theatrical release. Whatever works, I guess?