The Darkness review

Blumhouse Productions has defined their brand by creating low to mid budget haunted house thrillers that essentially combine the same elements from “The Shining,” “The Poltergeist” and “The Exorcist.” James Wan, so far, has embraced this style of pop horror filmmaking most successfully with his “Insidious” pairing and the “The Conjuring.”  Scott Derrickson’s “Sinister” had its moments as well and “The Purge” films seem to have a consistent draw that perplexes me. Most of Blumhouse’s other output has been spotty and it’s become all the more apparent that their formula is rapidly becoming stale. Their latest “Poltergeist” rip off, “The Darkness,” is just as lazy and bland as the title suggests.

Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell play Peter and Bronny Taylor, the parents of a dysfunctional American family—Mitchell is a recovered alcoholic and Bacon once had an affair. Their children consist of a pre-teen boy named Michael (David Mazouz) who lives with a form low-functioning autism and their seventeen-year-old daughter Stephany (Lucy Fry) has body image issues.  Shortly after a trip to the Grand Canyon, where Michael found and secretly brought home some ancient Anasazi artifacts, the family is slowly tormented by a dark presence in their home. Michael’s idiosyncrasies have become more violent and disturbing as everyone else in the house has experienced the psychological terror of strange noises, dirty hand prints, weird smells, barking dogs and self-starting water faucets.  

Forget for a moment that the movie’s handling of Native American culture and the subject of autism is surprisingly regressive, it’s also presented in a way that’s painfully boring and completely without entertainment value. It’s becomes clear that the filmmakers struggled to find any real moments of tension or fear in this lifeless slog and instead tried to make up for its lack of real scares with an annoyingly manipulative score, full of random jolts and ineffective moodiness. Bacon and Mitchell are trying their best to take this insipid, underwritten material seriously and guest star Paul Reiser, as Bacon’s misogynist boss, is trying his hardest to not take it seriously, but even when the character moments occasionally slips into “When a Man Loves a Woman” it’s undercut by the hapless shlock of the rest of the movie and transformed into unintentional Lifetime melodrama.  

Mazous, known by most as young Bruce Wayne on television’s “Gotham,” is given nothing to do here and his performance of a person with a real and complex condition is played with the seriousness of an after-school special. Hell, even the blatant transphobia of the first “Sleepaway Camp,” was at least shocking and audacious, even if a bit dated by today’s standards. Both the story’s autism angle—how are parents supposed to tell the difference between normal-weird and possessed by ancient Native spirts-weird—as well as the production’s Anasazi stylistics are never exploited in way that registers above cliché and tired.

At one point a large dog suddenly attacks the daughter in her bed. That was kind of cool.

It’s hard to say what went wrong here. Director Greg McLean made of my favorite modern horror films with the Aussie serial killer thriller “Wolfe Creek” but none of the style or the simmering tension of that project is transferred into this PG-13, overblown “Goosebumps” book. The shoddy screenplay isn’t helping anyone and the movie’s clear and direct influences loom large in sullen judgement. 

Grade - D

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Darkness."