{"id":25576,"date":"2017-06-27T18:38:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-27T22:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=25576"},"modified":"2017-06-27T18:38:53","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T22:38:53","slug":"darkness-rising-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/27\/darkness-rising-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Darkness Rising (2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A young woman feels a need to go visit the house where her mother seemingly lost her mind and killed her family.\u00a0 Once there, things start going bump in the night.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Written by Vikram Weet and directed by Austin Reading, Darkness Rising hits quite a few of the usual haunted house\/evil spirit tropes starting pretty early with the film.\u00a0 The script and direction take these and use them as is fairly usually done, not exactly all that originally.\u00a0 The film uses also quite a few jump scares to spice things up, but most of them will be predictable to most seasoned horror fans.\u00a0 That being said, some of them work and so does part of the story.\u00a0 The characters are not super developed as they are introduced, they do become more so as the film advances, which attempts to make the viewer care about them.\u00a0 However, in this viewer\u2019s case, it was a bit of a too little too late as they were just kind of there and fodder for the evil.\u00a0 This is not the cast fault, as it is how the film is written and built.<\/p>\n

The cast is rather small, led by Tara Holt as Madison with assists from Katrina Law as Izzy and Bryce Johnson as Jake, they go through the house and its evils, trying to survive and give their characters a bit of realism and life.\u00a0 They do decent enough jobs, but these performances could have used a little something more.\u00a0 Giving a very good performance as he usually does is Ted Raimi in a very small part that adds a lot to the interest but not really to the story which is really a shame.\u00a0 His part feels a bit tacked on as he does not match tonally and stylistically with the rest of the film.<\/p>\n

The special make-up effects and visual effects do look good, adding some creep and grossness to the film in key scenes.\u00a0 The evilness does get shown through the use of schlera contact lenses which give full white or full black eyes to characters when they are affected which has sadly become rather clich\u00e9.\u00a0 The rest of the effects which will not get spoiled here do look good and show talent form the crew of artists who created them.\u00a0 These effects pair well with the darkness throughout the film and with how the cinematography by Adam Biggs makes the house look.\u00a0 He takes a basic creepy house and elevates it to a house with a lot of scary potential, which gets a bit squandered during the film\u2019s scenes that were supposed to be scary and make the hair stand on the back of the viewer\u2019s neck.\u00a0 The way he shoots scenes shows that he know how to frame a creepy house and add to the feeling of a film with simple images.<\/p>\n

In a sub-genre with tons of outings annually, making a film that is actually scary is a hard task.\u00a0 Darkness Rising has a few good ideas, some original ones even, but it\u2019s not scary and fizzles fairly quickly once it does ramp up.\u00a0 The film sets-up a few good sequences that are creepy, but doesn\u2019t follow through with them or if it does, it barely led to a big scare.\u00a0 It\u2019s unfortunately a lot of screaming for very few scares and a few ick-inducing moments that do work.\u00a0 The story and scares do ramp up near the end, but it\u2019s not quite enough to make it great and too little too late unfortunately.<\/p>\n

Comes to select theaters, on VOD, and digital platforms on Friday June 30th<\/sup>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young woman feels a need to go visit the house where her mother seemingly lost her mind and killed her family.\u00a0 Once there, things start going bump in the night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1741,477,703,1008],"class_list":["post-25576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-haunted","tag-horror","tag-mystery","tag-supernatural"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25578,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25576\/revisions\/25578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}