Darkness

Another movie where a white family should have taken Eddie Murphy`s advise, I would move out of a house if you found foot and hand prints on the ceiling. This movie was boring and predicatable. For some reason the director thought intolerably long shots of swings in the rain would be scary. I was hopeful at the beginning with the quick cuts scary prelude (ala Seven) of the murder of 6 children, but the movie is just a rehash of a number of other better movies The Shining and The Believers. It even steals the premise of The Believers but with less of an explanation of why things are happening. Oh and the acting....ugh, the dad, my God I thought he was the guy from those instant coffee commercials that were popular a few years ago and the mom is no better, she is always to tired to notice the lights turn on and off or that her son is being bruised when he sleeps or there the foot prints on the ceiling. This movie sucked.

Darkness is a movie that simply goes nowhere. Lots of things happen all over the movie, with no connecting explanation. Without giving the ending away, I'll say that there pretty much is no ending. They could have randomly ended half an hour before or later. Once this movie is over, you get the impression you just watched random clips taken out of the complete movie. Many plot threads are opened, but never closed. A widely reported reason for this, is that the movie tried to avoid doing or deleted scenes showing any violence. But, in removing any violence, they failed to substitute with anything. Movies to a purpose, an endpoint, a reason for being. Aside from a bullet holed-plot, another problem is unbelievable characters. There's basically only a couple characters with any humanity in them. Only the star character has any appeal, and only because of the actress (Anna Paquin). Characters simply present no reason whatsoever for doing what they do. They just do it. skip it

I really, really, really wanted this movie to be good, and like most movies, it certainly had the potential to be a kick-arse, scary and psychological horror movie! Yes, potential it had, but sadly it failed, miserably! More holes in the plot than in a moth-eaten wardrobe of jumpers, no explanation to 99% of the hole-ridden plot, the acting was terrible (i've seen soap-operas with better acting in them), the direction and production was just laughable, and the end...? A cliffhanger? I just wish there had been a cliff to jump off after that terrible piece of wishy-washy rubbish (i'm trying my hardest not to use swear-words by the way). Let's just say I was left feeling cheated and robbed of my entrance money... If there was a lower mark than 1, I would've given it that!