Darkness (2004)

Thanks for the memories!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This has no gore ( since when did gore become horror) this has no fake boobs or babies being tortured. What this movie has is genius as far as I'm concerned. I haven't been scared to walk to the bathroom after a movie in decades. This movie did that. For two days. It's a smart ghost story, creepy, chilling and I just wanted go her the Heck out of my living room the entire time it was on. Much like a car accident , I couldn't stop. The plot; nothing spectacular there. It held up. The real meat and potatoes of this film are in atmosphere and direction. Goes to show how valuable a great Director is. The way it was filmed reminded me of one of my nightmares. It's like watching a nightmare on TV. For some reason, kids these days have turned into some real sadistic freaks. I haven't looked, but I'm willing to bet " I Spit on your Grave" , " Hostel" and " Saw" have better ratings than this gem. People want to watch the most gruesome things known to mankind and they call that horror and slap it with a 10. Because of how repulsive it was. On a human level. Ya, those people ( who I personally think have sadistic tendencies of their own) won't like this movie. Smart people will.

Boy-oh-boy, I'm tellin' ya, this "uncensored" version of Darkness was certainly mighty tame by today's super-gruesome standards of horrific horror films.And, not only was its gore-level almost at the point of being anemic (which was truly unforgivable) - But, the effect of its overall scare-factor never once came close to scoring a frighteningly legitimate bull's-eye. Never.At times I thought that Darkness was, indeed, coming close to hitting its intended mark, but, then, it inexplicably held back at that crucial point of achieving its desired goal. And, so, Darkness failed to satisfactorily deliver the horrific goods.And, on top of that major disappointment, this film's story about a happy-go-lucky family who move into a house that holds within its walls an unspeakably terrifying secret, covered no new ground, whatsoever.Yep. You can bet that we've all certainly seen, in one way or another, this one's all too familiar and predictably prepackaged story umpteen bloody times.Mind you, Darkness did manage (at times) to create an atmosphere of tension-filled dread that actually held my attention to some degree.But, its mounting suspense that led up to its final, climatic "twist" lost tons of steam when a minor key-character in the story was put in the unfavorable position of having to explain (at verbatim) everything covering a long, 40-year stretch of time. This explanation conveniently tied up all of the loose ends (leading up to this frenzied moment) and even threw a solar eclipse into the mix, for good measure.Anyways - I figure that a lot of this film's significant downfalls can be attributed to its rating of being suitable for those viewers 14 years and older.So, with that in mind, any out-and-out horror, and gore, is certainly going to be carefully held in check so as not to totally gross-out, or corrupt, those dear, impressionable, prepubescent minds of the younger generation.

Getting this out proved for me that there is such a thing as false optimism and if I were to say anything about this film it would be that I would have been incredibly disappointed if I had approached it even with a pessemistic view. The story in itself is atrocious, nonsensical and ridiculous to the extreme, making it hard to believe and hard to relate to from the start. The story spans across two continents and the Atlantic ocean yet somehow links back to the fathers childhood and .... oh I have no clue as to what was going on. Anyway a total disgrace poorly acting, proposterously written, laughably directed and accompanied by a stupid ending I can't rate this film any lower.WORST FILM EVER.

This review contains spoiler, please do not read it before watching the movie.To put my opinion in a nutshell: Darkness was a huge disappointment for me mainly because its creator is much more capable than this proved by the fact that later he wrote and directed Rec and Rec 2.The movie is really weak both in terms of characters and storyline. Firstly we see a recap of an old crime (there are many old newspaper extracts about it, all in English, seems a bit unlikely for me) when seven kids were kidnapped and six got killed as well in an old house. 40 years later a family is moving to Spain (not really clear why) into an old house (you would never guess which one) where strange things start to happen. The family members are all featureless, indifferent, nothing like actual people. They hardly ever do that anyone in real life would do. As for the story, it is very predictable, almost boring. Well, dad goes crazy, finds some scary symbol under the floor. His daughter (Anna Paquin, who was unexpectedly a disappointment too) and his Spanish friend find the symbol on the internet at once (naturally) and casually there is a very old book with the same symbol on its cover available in the local library (btw I don't think that you can touch any book that the librarian carries around in rubber gloves). The book is about a ritual to awake the darkness. This is the point where you can easily find out from the description of this ritual what happened in the past and who is the next target and what will happen to this person, and it will just miraculously really happen that way.In conclusion, the story is quite boring, easy to find out and the whole thing just doesn't make much sense. As for the characters... well, I just couldn't care whatever happens to them. So I think you won't lose anything by skipping this movie.