At the movies - Horror flick 'Darkness Falls' lacks horror

The Associated Press

"Darkness Falls," the new horror flick featuring special effects by Oscar-winning craftsman Stan Winston, is supposed to be dark and scary and make us all jump out of our seats.

It doesn't.

Instead, the audience was hooting and howling all the way through the movie as an evil Tooth Fairy named Matilda hunted down people in the dark, sucked their bodies into the sky, sliced them up and let them hit the ground with a thunk.

Horror movies -- the old-fashioned kind, not the spoofs -- are simply a subset of comedy, with well-recognized clues imbedded in each film as Pavlovian treats for an audience that craves the familiar.

When a "Darkness Falls" character says "You wait here, Larry," everyone knows he's going down -- and when the payoff comes, they laugh themselves silly.

A traditional genre film like "Darkness Falls" has dozens of these setups -- "We are safe in the car," "It's over now," "I'll go take a look, OK?" Sometimes they toss in an original twist -- but when the burly guy in plaid says "These are my woods and nobody messes with me" make no mistake, everyone knows: The lumberjack is going down.

Newcomer Chaney Kley is perfectly serviceable as the anguished Kyle, who as a boy was tormented by night terrors. Kyle comes back to his hometown of Darkness Falls to try to help a former girlfriend (Emma Caulfield, better known as the demon Anya from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") whose younger brother Michael (Lee Cormie) is now having those same terrors.

Kyle and Michael know, of course, what the doctors do not: There's a darn good reason to keep the lights on.

And that would be Matilda, the vengeful spirit who aims to wreak havoc on the town that lynched her 150 years ago.

Winston's Matilda requires six puppeteers to operate and has everything -- including unearthly groans and screeches -- that anyone could want from a psycho ghost-hag slasher.

Winston himself has already picked up four Academy Awards for special effects and makeup, including one for the box-office-stomping dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" and another for the vicious alien queen in "Aliens."

First-time director Jonathan Liebesman had some fun creating stark light-dark contrasts for a movie in which the action begins when the lights go out. Hitchcock he ain't, but the lighting for some scenes was downright arty, especially those with Cormie, a very expressive child actor from Australia.

No matter who the slasher du jour is, genre horror takes all of our deepest fears and wraps them up into one safe little package, pablum for an uncertain world.

Do the main characters die? Never. Do the petty and the pompous get their comeuppance? Always. Does evil prevail? Nah -- but there certainly could be a sequel or two in the works.

Horror fans might be happy to have a new villain to cheer in "Darkness Falls," but the rest of us have seen this all a thousand times before.

"Darkness Falls," distributed by Columbia Pictures and Revolution Studios, is rated PG-13 for terror and horror images and brief language. Running time: 85 minutes.

One and one-half stars out of four.