Extras :
Deleted Scenes, Making Of featurette, "The Legend of Matilda Dixon" featurette,
Storyboard comparisons, Trailers, Two audio commentaries
Director:
Jonathan Liebesman
(Darkness Falls, Genesis and Catastrophe, Immortals)
Producers:
John Fasano, John Hegeman, William Sherak and Jason Shuman
Screenplay:
John Fasano, James Vanderbilt and Joseph Harris
Music:
Brian Tyler
Cast:
Kyle Walsh: Chaney Kley
Caitlin Greene: Emma Caulfield
Michael Greene: Lee Cormie
Larry Fleishman: Grant Piro
Officer Matt Henry: Sullivan Stapleton
Young Kyle: Joshua Anderson
Young Caitlin: Emily Browning
Darkness Falls
proves that it's not only in the current climate that 'trial by media'
can happen, in that innocent people are tried and found guilty in the eyes
of the stupid who have no evidence to back it up, so it's understandable that
150 years ago Matilda Dixon put a curse on the town of "Darkness Falls",
after the population put her to death.
Her crime? She used to give a gold coin to any kids who lost a tooth, earning
her nickname "The Tooth Fairy", but when two kids disappeared one night
they figured it must be her fault, and since her face was scarred from a bad
fire in the house, one time, and couldn't be exposed to the light, you can
exactly just how they made her last hours on Earth even more painful. No doubt
she made things worse by subsequently creating the Dixons chain of shops,
complete with their know-nothing staff and its similarly pointless and braindead
offshoots, PC World, Currys and The Link... but I digress.
The film begins with the Tooth Fairy paying a spooky visit to a young Kyle
Walsh. He loses his last tooth - the point at which all havoc is allowed to
break loose, and before he can count the money under his pillow, doors slam
shut, his Mum goes to investigate, she winds up in a fatal way and he's put into
care after the townsfolk have assumed it's all his fault.
Fast-forward 12 years later and Kyle's (Chaney Kley) then-childhood
crush, Caitlin Greene (Emma Caulfield) has a younger brother suffering
the same night terrors and so seeks help, but Kyle has other problems in that
people still think he killed his mum and when they confront him and wind up
dead as well, the blinkered fools put two and two together to come up with five,
or at least the most plausible possibility.
If you want something to show off the speakers in your system in a subtle
fashion, with the way ol' TF's voice filters round them then this is worth a
look, but while it was too short to get bored (the last 10 of the 82 minutes are
reserved for the titles), there really is nothing new to this Freddy
Kreuger-style rip-off with people shrieking a lot at each other and if you can
find better things to watch, aside from the gorgeous Emma Caulfield (see
above-right), then do so.
The film is presented in the original 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen and there's
no problems with this as it spends a lot of time in the dark and copes very
well indeed, given the number of DD5.1 soundtracks and subtitle languages
on the disc.
Soundwise, there's nice use of SFX around the speakers as the Tooth Fairy
comes to visit and there's DD5.1 sound and dialogue in English, Hungarian,
Spanish and Russian.
For the extras, there's not a massive amount even if you are a fan of this
film. They start with three Trailers: Darkness Falls (2 mins, 16:9),
Anger Management (90 seconds, 16:9) and
xXx (1 minute,
somewhere between 16:9 and the original 2.35:1),
two featurettes, one straight-forward 'making of' (17 mins, 16:9) with cast
and crew trying to justify how incredible it was to make such a pile of
seenitallbefore; and "The Legend of Matilda Dixon", and how it was inspired
by the happenings around Port Fairy, Australia (11 mins, 4:3).
There are Four Storyboard Comparisons (6 mins), each showing clips and how
they were originally sketched out, 7 Deleted Scenes (9½ mins, 2.35:1 non-anamorphic)
and Two audio commentaries, one from the filmmakers and one from the
writers.
The menus are all static and silent, there are 28 chapters which is fine for
such a short film and there are subtitles in English, Spanish, Dutch,
Arabic, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Polish, Russian,
Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish
Did they really need so many?
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
Darkness Falls
proves that it's not only in the current climate that 'trial by media'
can happen, in that innocent people are tried and found guilty in the eyes
of the stupid who have no evidence to back it up, so it's understandable that
150 years ago Matilda Dixon put a curse on the town of "Darkness Falls",
after the population put her to death.