Rating of
1/4
Lazy Rip-Off of Better Movies
Unknown - wrote on 05/21/16
Have you seen a movie where a family is haunted by ghosts, but nothing of actual threat ever happens? Then you've already seen this entire movie! 'The Darkness' is a beat-for-beat exercise in the routine trappings of horror movie tropes, and nothing more. There are many scenes that completely rip off other (WAY better) movies. The names are too long to list. The story is so basic that you could guess it’s entirety just in the first few seconds of the trailer. Even though the ghosts are present from the start, they don’t do much of anything at all besides common household annoyances. The family easily ignores this, putting all the blame on their autistic child. They are at each other for different reasons that don’t pertain to the entity they have ignored. There’s a real attempt at some dramatic clash between the four of them. Each of the actors are solid, making these scenes of domestic troubles actually easy to sit through. They manage to make the situations not feel too contrived. I have to share minor credit for this aspect. However, the actual “horror” of this scary film is completely non-existent. Long stretches of boredom are punctuated by yet another terrible cliche. The finale is so lazy it’s almost as if everyone involved in the making of the movie just decided to quit trying entirely.
