Review - Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Grade: D

Good: Classic Del Toro horror, similar to, but nowhere near as profound as Pan’s Labyrinth with its mix of the frightening and the fabled. A slightly inspired ending. Bailee Madison shows some range as a kid creeped out of her mind.

Bad: No true scares at all. Predictable clichéd haunted house story frames the proceedings. Holmes is predictably lackluster, as is Pearce, sadly.

Ugly: A Dead Tooth Fairy

**MILD SPOILERS AHEAD**

Hellboy II is one of my absolute favorite movies by Guillermo Del Toro. He not only took the Hellboy concept and ran with it, but he managed to weave his own voice into the narrative, creating a fascinating tale about the death of the faerie folk. The main antagonist, alabaster-skinned elven pretty boy, Prince Nuada, even used swarms of ‘tooth faeries’ to attack the humans who threatened the dominion of the fae.

Del Toro clearly loved those little buggers because his latest producing effort, the Troy Nixey-directed Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, is all about the horrors of tooth faeries.

No joke. Though, I wish it was.

Dark, a remake of the 1973 TV movie, begins with sullen tween Sally (an accent-less Bailee Madison, last seen dialing up the precociousness in Adam Sandler’s Just Go With It) moving to Rhode Island to live with her estranged father, Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new (read: young) girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) in what is obviously the Addams Family’s summer home, but is actually said to be the home of long deceased nature painter Edward Blackwood. For a change, the family actually has a fairly viable reason to inhabit an undoubtedly haunted mansion: Alex and Kim are remodeling the home to, in a tip of the hat to a modern look-at-me culture that is also broke, show it in an Architectural Digest spread then flip it for cash. Luckily, Sally has arrived just in time to make Alex and Kim’s job that much harder by discovering a hidden basement that is home to horde of filthy critters that are blinded by light, but obsessed with consuming humans and their teeth. Per usual, Sally’s too-busy father dismisses her while eager to please Kim slowly warms to the idea that Sally may not be as damaged as her Adderall prescription would imply, as they face of with a threat that could probably be managed in one episode of Billy the Exterminator.

Sadly, there is nothing to be afraid of in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. I have a pretty good idea of what Del Toro and Nixey were aiming for with Dark—a traditional haunted house story with a fantastic twist—but their efforts fall distressingly flat. Dark opens with a slow burn that’s filled with creepy atmosphere, which would be great if it wasn’t so identical to any other haunted house flick made in the last five to ten years. Once, the menace behind the eeriness appear, nearly an hour into the movie, it’s pretty underwhelming. The creatures are far squickier than they are terrifying—think Gremlin rats—seeming more like an annoyance than a credible threat. It’s sad to say, but Del Toro and Nixey would have been better off following the cliché all the way through and just using a ghost. Nixey does an ample job aping the visual style that Del Toro perfected in genre greats Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos, but because it’s so identifiably Del Toro, the audience never gets to absorb the fullness of Nixey’s vision, if it is at all different from Del Toro’s.

Nixey and Del Toro aren’t helped by the all-around lackluster performances from the cast. Katie Holmes is predictably bland, but it’s disappointing to see the typically phenomenal Pearce slumming it. Holmes plays the same eternally forlorn girl-next-door character she mastered back when Dawson's Creek was popular, and which she drudged up in Batman Begins and last year’s The Romantics while Pearce is saddled with the thankless role of the father too busy, blind and jaded to see the obvious problems within his family and the house. Young Madison, on the other hand, has to anchor the film by showing more range than both Pearce and Holmes. While Holmes is mostly doe-eyed and Pearce is aggressively oblivious, Madison gets to play frightened, sullen, pensive and inquisitive. Granted, Madison’s Sally isn’t a revelation in terms of children in horror, but it’s still heads and tales above Holmes and Pearce. Ultimately, Madison’s performance is the bright spot in a dim proceeding.

Despite the evidence, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark isn’t a complete wash. Fans of Del Toro’s unique view on fairy tale creatures and his work on Hellboy can view this as an curious side-story for one his more memorable creations. Also, the ending, while not remotely surprising, offers an inspired bit at the end that of course sets up potential sequels and franchises, which this project probably doesn’t deserve. Aside from those, admittedly, weak platitudes, Dark offers little reason to lighten your wallet this weekend, so don’t be afraid to avoid it until it hits the TNT Saturday movie marathon in 2015.

Splice - Review

** out of five stars

Rule 34 states, “if it exists, there’s porn of it.” After catching a preview screening of writer-director Vincenzo Natali’s new sci-fi/horror thriller Splice, I’m positive that a new type of niche internet porn will arise: gene-spliced human-mutant tongue/human porn. Then again, that may already exist.

My girlfriend called it disturbing; I just thought it was silly and pretentious. Splice is the “cautionary tale” of gene-splicing biologists, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), who, in their quest to create a cure-all protein for a “evil” pharmaceutical company, create a mutant spliced from animal and human DNA. Of course, their project goes south when their mad scientist tendencies flare and they choose to raise the mutant, named Dren (Delphine Chanéac)—nerd backwards, how cute—as a pet/child. Complications ensue when Dren, who grows at an accelerated rate, matures to roughly age 16 in a matter of weeks and faces a sexual awakening that will make audiences cringe or chuckle. Splice culminates with a disturbingly gruesome and silly denouement that ranks as one of the most ludicrous “now, I’ve seen it all” moments ever.

Splice lives or dies by the audience’s willingness to buy into its premise because beyond that there’s nothing spectacular or clever about this flick. The plot is a stale rehash of the age-old “scientist push boundaries and pay for it” construct, dashed with a bit of moral hand-wringing over the ethical concerns of cloning and “animal” testing. The pacing is atrocious. 90% of Splice is setup, with only the last half-hour registering any active development of character or plot. At least an 75 minutes of the film consists of Brody and Polley’s characters bickering over the “morality” of their experiment then struggling with their twisted parenthood, which would be acceptable if the characters were relatable or intelligent. Where Brody’s Clive is a optimistic, if weak-willed, hipster scientist, Polley’s Elsa is a particularly unlikeable mix of a damaged abuse survivor and smug mad scientist. Despite their advanced education, both lack any semblance of common sense when it comes to raising a human/animal mutant hybrid pet/child like Dren. Dren her/itself becomes a more defined character near the films conclusion, but—due to a lack of language, weird spasms and creepy glares—mostly comes off as more of a creepy, horny pet than anything resembling a human.

Despite the issues with plot, pacing and character, atmosphere in Splice is top notch. The camera filter gives the film a blue-green tint that makes the audience feel like they’re submerged in a deep-sea sensory deprivation tank. Also, the limited cast and empty locales, such as the lab and Elsa’s farm, contribute to a foreboding sense of isolation that enhances the notion of hidden shame running through Splice. In addition to atmosphere, easily the film’s greatest achievement was Dren. As a mix of animal human DNA that is 75% human, 5% rat, 5% scorpion, 5% fish, 5% bat/bird and 5% gargoyle, Dren is suitably creepy and oddly alluring. Dren is designed as a sexy manticore, with enough humanity—of course, in the supple female form a la Species—to somehow seduce but lacking enough to make even the most open mind think twice. If Natali’s goal was to achieve the balance between seductive and unnerving, he succeeded ably with Dren.

If Dren and her “parents” exploits prove less then disturbing then this may be the flick for you. Otherwise, it is an acquired taste that most audiences won’t want to sample. Splice may have a wonderfully speculative, if creepy, moral conundrum at heart, but its stale plot, turgid pacing and distasteful characters will keep audiences at a distance. While it succeeds on atmosphere and “creature” effects, Splice tries to hard to ask questions that have been asked before while trying to creep its audience out. It succeeds more in the latter than the former, because I felt pretty slimy after leaving the theater.