DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

The monsters hiding in the vast darkness of the spooky, abandoned Blackwood Manor of spooky, abandoned Providence, Rhode Island are revealed very early on to be somewhat similar to the fairy tale of the 'tooth fairy' in that they desire children's teeth.  Later on we learn from a helpful librarian (who is a young man and not an old woman) that Pope Sylvester II negotiated a peace treaty with the prehistoric 'fairy folk' that set the terms we are all most familiar with: tooth goes under pillow, gets replaced with a coin, nobody eats any children.  Well that's plenty interesting, but the more we learn about these little devils, and the more we see of them, the less menace they provide.  They terrorize the central little girl endlessly, but since they always surround her and dance around instead of inflicting any harm, we start to doubt their bona fides.  Eat somebody already, ya little bastards!

Katie Holmes is the first billed star oddly enough, playing the girlfriend to Guy Pearce, the architect divorcee who just sunk all his money (and the bank's) into a sprawling, semi-evil estate that he plans to flip for massive profit.  Bailee Madison plays Pearce's daughter who shows up to live with him and is naturally a person-of-interest for the subterranean goblins who insist on children's teeth as their sole sustenance.  She's a surprisingly enjoyable character, considering she's a sullen pouter whose curiosity unleashes the basement bogeymen and her parents are paper-thin versions of 'parent who won't care' and 'parent who slowly starts to care.'

Producer/co-writer Guillermo del Toro has ventured in this territory before, with certain elements cribbed from The Orphanage, Hellboy 2, and Pan's Labyrinth.  The credits even list Guillermo as one of the voices of the monsters.  They talk a lot.  Most of the laughs and the scares come from something that one of them whispers or shouts at their precocious prey.  I also laughed at something Katie Holmes said.  After asking the little girl if she know what an 'interior decorator' is and getting an affirmative, she uses the word 'frieze' in the next sentence.  Slow down there Mrs Cruise; she understands what your profession entails, yes she's bright alright, but that's an SAT word and she's eight years old.

Every scary movie fan knows about the early 'accidental' death.  Before most/any characters acknowledge the sinister threat around them, there will be a fatality attributed to random chance or bad luck.  The young girl who was victim of a 'boat accident' during the opening of Jaws, the garbage man crushed inside his own garbage truck in one of the Child's Play films, John Travolta punches his boss in the heart and calls it a heart attack in Face/Off, I think Jon Voight puts a bee inside Erik Stoltz's snorkel in Anaconda, fill in your favorite here.  This film has a bizarre twist on that old chestnut.  The victim survives and they're the ones insisting it was an accident.

The grizzled old caretaker (Australian character actor Jack Thompson) runs afoul of the nasty little beasties, and they stab and slice him with all his tools, even breaking off knives and scissors blades in his torso.  But he manages to stumble out the basement, bark at everyone not to investigate the aforementioned monster-filled basement, and then collapse near-death.  Everybody believes his story.  Guy Pearce especially.  "What?  Oh that?  That was an accident!" he says with smarmy incredulity when Katie Holmes brings up the vicious mauling of their mysterious old caretaker.  Since the old dude lives though, everybody has to accept his story.  Guess he's just a clumsy old asshole.

But what the hell could he have told them?  That he slipped and fell, and stabbed himself with every one of his tools and broke some of them off in his own body?  Maybe since he declines to sue, Guy Pearce was willing to believe anything.  The caretaker seems to be keeping secrets for some reason.  He knows about the monsters.  He tries to keep the girl away from the walled-up hidden basement (it's possible he's the one who concealed it), but he doesn't tell anybody what he knows.  The monsters accuse him of telling people about them, but he denies it. 

Even when Katie Holmes visits him in the hospital, he just leads her on a goose chase to catch up on the information that we learned in the opening scene.  Just tell her already!  It's not like you have to go back.  What dirt do the monsters have on this guy?  Everybody keeps mentioning that his grandfather used to work at the mansion.  So he's known the monsterific truth about the house for decades and still doesn't want to find a new job?  He's not alone; plenty of people keep going back after they all know for real that there's tiny tooth-taking gremlins.

This movie even includes a classic scene borrowed from countless generic comedies: the big important dinner party with the boss/investors.  I sure hope some crazy little girl doesn't ruin the whole party by getting attacked by monsters!  Oh silly little girl.  The ruined dinner party doesn't work much in movies.  Exception: Beetlejuice.  It's not scary, but it's funny that the ghosts try to ruin the party with possession-karaoke, and it's funny that the guests end up loving the whole ordeal.  Every other movie that plays it straight: shame on you.

~ Katie Holmes has a collection of Polaroid cameras in this film.  In real life, dedicated fans of the formerly ubiquitous discontinued self-developing camera have duplicated the original process, right down to using the original factory.

~ This film does not really deserve its R rating, especially considering Rape: The Motion Picture got a PG-13 rating earlier this year.

~ Filmed in Australia.

~ This film is a remake of the 1973 TV movie of the same name.

Hi I want your teeth.