The Darkness

It’s vaguely endearing to watch Bacon and Mitchell actually try to act their way through the film’s family drama, as though it weren’t a perfunctory pretext to jump scares. The Darkness needs their chops. It needs anything to distract horror fans from the fact that there’s nothing new here.

The Darkness offers very few new scares, mainly because it's so haunted by the ghosts of far better horror movies.

While McLean and company admirably aim for some relevance by tying the Taylors’ haunting to their personal demons, ultimately The Darkness is just the same old show: things that go bump in the night, and the tasteful decor they defile.

It’s like being haunted by outsized chimney sweeps that never bathe. And for the most part, it’s about that scary.

At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.

The Darkness is pretty much a total bust—it isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it plods along at such a snails pace that even though it clocks in at just over 90 minutes, it plays like it runs at least twice that.

Amid the rarely very creepy buildup to the Amityville-ish showdown to come, the screenplay piles on more unrelated domestic drama than the picture can take.

Mostly bad, generic supernatural fluff. The ONLY remotely interesting part is how the family is infected by "the darkness" so that their pre-existing faults and secrets are exposed to all. Of course those wind up being just insignificant moments in a plot moving full steam ahead towards the most boring and predictable Poltergeist-style house exorcism ending possible without much thought put behind any of it.

When the ancient spirits set loose. Usually horror films are the most clichéd genre, especially when it comes to those scaring parts, all the films use the same sudden sound effects and disfigured human images with the strong makeup or the graphics. This film is nothing less than any of those, but a bit too much in the first three quarters. Like they are keeping some suspense, but it was just dragging to extend the film length and what comes in the final quarter is actually the story with a twist. So when that revelation happens, you would probably lose complete interest on this. Because that's not the demons you're expecting after all the hype was created in the earlier segment. The story was just okay, but it was well known to us in different forms from the different films. In this, it is set in a different location with different cast, so that makes the film is fresh, but it wasn't. Some ancient spirits were set loose when a family was picnicking and it follows them to their house. Now they suffer from some unexplainable events and they decide to get rid bringing the people who can. That leads to the final act where the story comes to end. They say it was inspired by the real event involving a family. So that might interest some viewers to check it out. But if you're an atheist, this is just a joke. From the director of 'Wolf Creek' with the decent performances by Kevin Bacon and Radha Mictchell, the film did not become best among its theme. Just a watchable film, after that you won't going to remember it a week or a month later. Very few might like it, but it's impossible to say who they're, so I'm not going to suggest or reject it. 4/10

Absolutely terrible. Everything is a cliche and idiotic. Kevin is clearly in this for a paycheck and the only reason why you should even watch the movie on tv.

Picture every single horror cliche, element and character trope imaginable - you have The Darkness. An extremely boring, predictable and stupid waste of time.

A horror film that isn't scary in the least. It's just cliche after cliche with a pretty poor script. I will give it points for a decent idea toward the 3rd act, but overall this one is pretty bad. D-