{"id":27955,"date":"2018-10-10T15:36:54","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T19:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=27955"},"modified":"2018-10-10T15:36:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T19:36:22","slug":"the-darkness-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/10\/the-darkness-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"The Darkness (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019ve yet to be impressed by anything that Greg McLean has done in cinema and he meets my expectations with \u201cThe Darkness.\u201d Though it\u2019s defined as a horror movie, I\u2019d be hesitant to call it that since the horror genre\u2019s veneer is so thin. \u201cThe Darkness\u201d is really more of a painfully awkward drama about a dysfunctional family who put up with one another more than loves each other. In the prologue they seem to like one another just fine, but when we see them in their own surroundings, we\u2019re introduced to petulant, obnoxious, rude, and self destructive people with no clear reason for being so dysfunctional beyond it being a good pit stop before the weak scares.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

After the Taylor family go to a trip to the Grand Canyon, their youngest son, the autistic Michael, falls through a hole in the ground and discovers a small grouping of rocks. After miraculously escaping the hole, the Taylors return home to learn that nothing is the same anymore. We\u2019re told that, but really everything seems like the same for these characters, and the only noticeable change is that Michael looks aimlessly in to a wall talking to a female entity we never see, and there\u2019s a growing blotch where he\u2019s looking that no one notices. Along the way \u201cThe Darkness\u201d performs like a drama about a family rotting from the inside.<\/p>\n

Michael is autistic and violent, his mom played by Radha Mitchell enables him and never says no to his demands, dad Peter is an overworked architect contemplating an affair with a young co-worker, and daughter Joy is a resentful brat who we greets every visitor to her room with \u201cGet the hell out.\u201d Oh and she\u2019s bulimic! Why? I don\u2019t know, because it\u2019s dramatic! \u201cThe Darkness\u201d is so bereft of scares that it can\u2019t even derive the smallest jumps. I\u2019m not sure what the spirit is doing to the Taylors beyond annoying the shit out of them. It taps in to their insecurities and irritations and uses those elements to\u2014uh—give them a bad day.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a jump scare (I use the term very loosely) with a snake that goes nowhere, a hilarious dog attack, and the confusing presence of Paul Reiser who is given so much more importance than he needs for a movie of this ilk. There\u2019s no pay off, no scares, no original plot elements, but a ton of melodrama worthy of a TV movie of the week. \u201cThe Darkness\u201d wants to be \u201cAmityville\u201d or \u201cPoltergeist,\u201d but it\u2019s just PG-13 pseudo-horror drama muck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve yet to be impressed by anything that Greg McLean has done in cinema and he meets my expectations with \u201cThe Darkness.\u201d Though it\u2019s defined as a horror movie, I\u2019d be hesitant to call it that since the horror genre\u2019s veneer is so thin. \u201cThe Darkness\u201d is really more of a painfully awkward drama about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[477,575,1008,1087],"class_list":["post-27955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-movie-reviews","tag-horror","tag-kevin-bacon","tag-supernatural","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27955","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27957,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27955\/revisions\/27957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}