Year: 2016
Director: Greg McLean
Cast: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, David Mazouz
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Read my full review of The Darkness over at Arrow in the Head.
Additional Notes: Bronny?! What in the f**king hell kind of name is Bronny?! And the kinda racist Native American demons are called Jenny? Who the fish cock is Jenny?!
If you had transcribed my entire post-Darkness rant to Sergio on our car ride home, it might just have been the greatest review ever written. The Darkness is a soul-suckingly crappy movie. It’s one of those bad movies that are so po-faced, they even suck all the joy out of mocking them under your breath.
I don’t know what happened behind the scenes on this one, but it sure wasn’t pretty. The chewing hum holding this rickety film together is patently visible. First there’s the fact that their family friends are yanked out of the film with a cane and replaced by Kevin Bacon’s boss and his wife, who are jammed into a plot function that’s physically impossible for them to serve. Then there’s the scene where Lucy Fry’s after-school special bulimia is cured by one visit to the doctor. Also I’m pretty sure they switched around the five animals the demons represent mid-film, hoping we wouldn’t notice.
It’s an outright disaster, boosted only by the ineffable campiness of the third act and the production design (the mom has a giant bonsai tree on her nightstand… in the bathroom). Also the balloons. Never forget the balloons.
TL:DR: The Darkness is a shamelessly derivative, tedious movie that makes me fear for the future of Blumhouse.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1037
Any chance of expanding upon the balloons? The odds of seeing this are low. Well, except possibly for the purposes of compiling a worst-of list. (Not that I want to prejudge it, and not that I put much stock in Rotten Tomatoes--almost the opposite, really, given that the 50-60% point appears to be the sweet spot where a lot of my favorite new movies wind up--but a literal 0% remains a thing to be taken very seriously.)
ReplyDeleteAlright, strap yourself in...
Delete(SPOILERS) First, you need some valuable context. Earlier, in one of the movie's many pointless grocery store scenes, the autistic son demands the mom buy two Mylar balloons. Presumably one is for him and one is for Jenny.
So. Later. The medium has these two divining rods that tick like Geiger counters, and she's pointing them around the house like six shooters to cleanse things or whatever. The first thing she points them at is the balloons, which she yells at in Spanish ("This is a house of the living! Not of the dead!"). After a sizable portion of subtitled screaming, the balloons explode in a burst of fire.
(END SPOILERS)
And yeah, I tend to have my qualms about RT scores, but The Darkness earns it more than any current film I've seen. It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it deserves not a scrap of positive feedback.