DARKNESS FALLS (2003) Damn tweens. They didn't even exist before PG-13 did! No news here: most R-rated movies are aimed at teenagers. Most PG movies are aimed at small children. G movies are aimed at fetuses. So it follows that PG-13 movies are aimed at "tweens", those people who are old enough to want to watch sex and violence, but too young to see any of it without an accompanying adult. I miss the day when movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey could incidentally get a rating based on its content, instead of today's standard, when the "objectionable" content in movies is tailored for its target audience. (how else do you explain the strip-club scene in Lost In Translation?) Darkness Falls at least starts out honestly enough, with a spoken prologue which gets the villainous witch's backstory out of the way quickly (it's bad enough that it coming from a character later on wouldn't be forgiveable). It sets up a movie featuring young actors and telling a tale of childhood fears. A couple of young friends run afoul of the Tooth Fairy, a 19th century witch which cannot tolerate the light, and adults don't believe in. The boy's mom seals her fate with the line "See Kyle, there's nothing to be afraid of!" and...flash forward a dozen years to an adult cast. It wasn't good before this, but it had the benefit of being cast for its audience. But now the young 'uns are gone, replaced by a couple of (early) twentysomethings which would fit in fine in any R-rated horror movie. The ten-year-olds who are going to enjoy this movie may well find themselves missing less parental protagonists; the too-young child of one of those adults probably won't play as well for them as the two in the intro. Will they care about the plot? Will they question why the witch, after being content with so many unsolved child murders in this town over the years (sounds like a lousy place to raise a family), suddenly goes berserk now and tears up the sheriff's department? Or how it makes sense to put a kid suffering from night terrors in a sensory deprivation tank? Hell if I know, I don't have kids. But I'd bet the boys would appreciate how Emma Caulfield sees fit to strip down to her tank top by movie's end. I know I do! Even beyond that, you'd have to be pretty fresh off the tree to find any scares or fresh ideas in this movie. A false scare by cat...lines like "Look man, I don't want any trouble!"...you know the climax will happen at the lighthouse, because there's a lighthouse...the dumbest gun store clerk since The Terminator (perhaps even The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly)...and needless to say, the witch is unmasked at the end, sporting a Stan Winston-made burn-victim face which might mildly ick out some of the more sheltered tweens, but anyone who's ever seen a Freddy Krueger movie won't blink. Darkness Falls shares a lot of premises and plot points with They, which came out around the same time, and I rented in the same stack, though scratches on the disc prevented me from getting past scene ten. Judging from those scenes, They was by far the better movie, though it wasn't very good either. Not to be seen. If you absolutely have to, stop it after 20 minutes. 11 minutes of the 86-minute running time is composed of closing credits, something that is likely to come as a relief to anyone stuck halfway through this movie. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE