As much as this pains me to admit, there’s just no getting around it: The Darkness is a huge misfire for Australian horror director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, The Belko Experiment). Completely devoid of scares or ingenuity on any real level, this lifeless family melodrama could have aired on the Hallmark Channel and nobody would have been the wiser. I mean, hands down, the scaries thing in the movie is its graphic depiction of bulimia.
And, I swear, I’m not even trying to be snarky. I’m a fan of everybody involved in this project, from writers Shayne Armstrong & Shane Krause who broke onto the scene with 2008’s wonderful suburban serial killer flick Acolytes, to producer Jason Blum and actors Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell. It feels like an odd miscalculation from a group of talented folks who should have been able to see the problems a mile away.
So what happened here? Was The Darkness a troubled production? Was it a rushed shoot with too little resources? Was McLean hamstrung by an underdeveloped script?
To anyone interested in the answers to these question, prepare to be disappointed in this week’s Blu-ray release which sheds no light on the story behind the film; a story that I have a feeling is more interesting than the film itself. Which is too bad, because often a great commentary, or series of candid interviews can go a long way to earning a film goodwill with genre fans. Lionsgate’s release of Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic director’s cut comes to mind as an example of this. Allowing del Toro to spill the beans on the troubles he faced on that production changed the narrative on the film and it has something of a new place in the eyes of his admirers.
Unfortunately, McLean and Blum don’t sit down to discuss the film, nor do they show up for even a simple publicity reel. There are no behind the scenes featurettes with the actors or to provide additional information on the aboriginal myths that fuel the film’s premise. Instead we get a couple deleted scenes and an alternate ending which, if it had stayed in the film, would have made the film even worse, essentially killing the film’s message of family unity in the face of great adversity.
Speaking of the myths that fuel the film’s premise, I was on fully on board with the concept of a vacationing family unwittingly bringing something ancient and deadly home with them from holiday. If you’ve ever been to, say, the Catacombs in Paris, you’ll know how blatantly tourists refuse to follow any rules, touching everything and taking pictures when they shouldn’t.
And these dudes *should* have been super scary, right? Right?
Unfortunately, they’re really not. Particularly during the film’s final moments when they sort of just stand there while the heroes dispatch them one by one. For a studio with a track record like Blumhouse, it truly boggles the mind.
At the end of the day, The Darkness is an odd misstep for Blumhouse, as forgettable at home as it was in theatres. Maybe one day we’ll get some insight into what happened, but until then wait until it hits Netflix.