Darkness Falls

If the writers, producers, and director of Darkness Falls would have held themselves to a higher standard than just recycling the same cheap, soundtrack-aided, horror movie jump-frights that have made the genre so tiresome, this movie might have been a real goosepimpler. Its recasting of the Tooth Fairy as a bloodthirsty specter hunting the kids of a small town is creepy enough--in fact, pretty soon the sight of a child setting a tooth on his dresser at bedtime is enough to get your anxiety flowing (not to mention your curiosity, wondering what kind of sick stage mother lets her little kid star in a horror movie). But acting on the assumption that their target audience doesn't care about anything except a handful of popcorn-spilling jolts, neither director Jonathan Liebesman nor any of the film's three writers put much effort toward creating a good scary movie--instead, they've simply dropped a new supernatural, masked killer under the hood of the same old jalopy and put the pedal to the metal. Very optional. [Note: DVD extras include both full screen and widescreen editions, audio commentaries (one with director Jonathan Liebesman, producers William Sherak and Jason Shuman, and writer James Vanderbilt; the other by writers John Fasano and Joe Harris), a 17-minute making-of featurette, the 10-minute featurette “The Legend of Matilda Dixon,” seven deleted scenes, and three storyboard comparisons. Bottom line: rich in extras, poor in narrative ingenuity.] (R. Blackwelder)