So, remember last week when I said I didn’t know what to expect for this week’s movie?
Yeah…I really wish someone had warned me.
Also, apparently, since we’re on the Ds now, that means that I’m gonna have to watch a whole lot of demon movies since apparently, in Hollywood, D stands for Demon more than anything else in a horror movie. Yay, me!
Normally, that’s not something I would mind, exactly, but this week’s movie…sigh…let’s just get into it, shall we?
The Darkness starring Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, David Mazouz, Lucy Fry, Ming-Wa Wen, Ilza Ponko, Alma Martinez, and Paul Reiser. Yes, that Paul Reiser. You know, Mad About You, really just there for comedy relief Paul Reiser. Yeah. And you might think that Reiser has a more serious tone in this movie. You might think that, but you’d be wrong.
Okay, so, I’ll give you a second to get your Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon connections out of your system. Don’t worry. I found myself realizing that with Ming-Wa Wen being in this movie that means everyone in Agents of Shield has a Bacon number of two. It’s fine.
All right, done? Okay, let’s move on.
First, let me just say that this movie suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkssss. Like sucks. Like not scary, barely interesting, and pretty inflammatory to autistic people and Native Americans and Mexicans. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Basic synopsis. So, Alcoholic Wife(Mitchell) is married to Mr. Can’t-keep-it-in-his-pants (Bacon). They have an autistic son (Mazouz) and a bulimic daughter (Fry). Before we go on, these are pretty serious issues ESPECIALLY when a whole family of four has to contend with them. You’d think that the screenwriters might have done a little bit of research…right?
NO! Of course not. Why do research when making it up is SO much more fun?
So, family of four go out to some canyon on a trip. Autistic son falls into a cave and finds stones with weird carvings on them on a makeshift altar. He, of course, pockets them and takes them home.
Pretty soon weird stuff starts happening around the house. Doors and cabinets opening by themselves, sooty handprints all over the place, you know, basic haunting stuff.
From there, autistic son starts acting out, which, I gotta pause for a second here. Outside of the fact that the son is the only one of them, that really doesn’t look like any of them…like at all…like he looks like a completely different race than the rest of the family…like maybe mom hooked up with the Jewish mailman kind of different…yeah, it’s weird.
So, outside of that fact, they don’t talk about their son’s condition. I mean, they do, but they do it in a weird, vague kind of way like: “He sees things we don’t see” and “He’s just different from the rest of us”. We don’t even hear anyone refer to him as being autistic until he tries to kill his grandmother’s cat.
Okay, so son’s acting out, then ghostly stuff starts happening, all the while, the family is fighting with one another and, by the way, there is zero chemistry between any of them. I was basically watching four actors just trying to get through a dang shoot. Even Kevin Bacon seemed to just be giving up halfway through his lines in spots.
Somewhere along the line, Alcoholic Mom hears about a psychic healer through her husband’s boss’ wife, played respectively by Reiser and Wen. So, she tries to bring it up, but hubby blows her off until a bunch of soot tries to kill Little Miss Bulimia.
They move out to a hotel and call the psychic healer (Martinez), who shows up to the house with her…daughter(Ponko), I think. (I was looking at my Facebook by this point) Anyway, the healer, through translation because, of course, she doesn’t speak a word of English, tells them that ancient demons from a long-lost Native American tribe are haunting their house and if they don’t stop them, then the end of the world will come.
But no pressure.
Psychic Healer and her translator set to work banishing the spirit all “Go into the light, Carol Ann” but end up failing…miserably. Autistic boy, who’s been totally cool with being kidnapped by Ancient tribe of demons opens a portal and proceeds to step through. Mr. Can’t-Keep-it-in-his-pants finds him and decides, right then, that he actually does care about saving this stinking pile of a movie and opts to sacrifice himself for the life of his son.
But wait! It gets worse!
Autistic son finds the stones that opened the portal in the first place, puts them back on the altar (which is in the portal he stepped through) and banishes the demons. Himself. No need for anyone to banish them with strange Mexican powers…cuz that’s a thing.
And they all live happily ever after effectively killing any hope of saving this movie by perishing in a ball of blue flame like I’d hoped.
Do I really need to say that this is getting a raspberry? I mean, gah. It was really just...basic. Basically awful.
(Yay, Demons!)
O~
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