The tag line for this film reads, “Every legend has its dark side.” And when you think about it, that’s true. Take the Tooth Fairy, for instance. On the surface, she’s just a benevolent spirit who runs a presumably respectable business trading kids’ unwanted baby teeth for cash. But exactly how does she manage to steal undetected into their bedrooms at night, and why aren’t kids supposed to peek at her? Or more creepy to ponder, exactly what does she want with all those baby teeth? Kind of casts her in a whole new light, doesn’t it?
That’s the idea behind Darkness Falls, a would-be grim fairy tale that gives the Tooth Fairy a nasty image makeover. The revised legend, narrated at the beginning, casts her as the malevolent ghost of an eccentric, burn-scarred old woman out to avenge her own wrongful lynching more than a century earlier. (It seems there was a misunderstanding about a couple of missing kids.) Having cursed the town of Darkness Falls, she now visits children on the night after they’ve lost their last baby tooth—and in the following sequence, a promisingly creepy bit of business directly descended from an earlier short by writer Joe Harris, we see what happens when a young boy named Kyle Walsh (Joshua Anderson) makes the fatal mistake of peeking.
But then the plot makes a mistake of its own, jumping ahead a dozen years. It’s not a fatal mistake, but the inconsistency of tone takes away from the overall effect. Instead of fulfilling the scary promise of those first scenes, the film switches to action-horror mode as the still-nyctophobic Walsh (Chaney Kley) returns to Darkness Falls to help his childhood girlfriend’s kid brother (Lee Cormie), who has been suffering from the same “night terrors” since he caught a glimpse of the Tooth Fairy. (The girlfriend, incidentally, is played by Buffy, the Vampire Slayer’s Emma Caulfield, the only recognizable member of the cast.)
The problem with Walsh’s homecoming is that everyone thinks he’s insane—a problem exacerbated by the Tooth Fairy’s insistence on killing everyone around him and leaving him the only suspect. Not surprisingly, she always manages to be in the right place at the right time, flying around and uttering awful groans from behind an expressionless white mask she must have picked up at Horror Villains ‘R’ Us.
Luckily, she has a weakness: she can’t stand light. This means, of course, that the light bulbs in Darkness Falls have an annoyingly frequent tendency to flicker and fail, which at least explains how the town got its improbable name. (Never mind that we’ve already seen many of the same stay-in-the-light scenes acted out by Vin Diesel and company in 2000’s Pitch Black.) The requisite people-in-peril scenes are occasionally enlivened by bits of humorous dialogue, but by the time an exasperated Walsh mutters, “All this over a fucking tooth,” you’ll likely be thinking the same thing.
(2/4)