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Sally (Bailee Madison), a child of divorced parents, from one day to
the next finds herself forced to live with her father Alex (Guy Pearce)
and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes), whom Sally doesn't even know or
like, in an old and spooky house which the two of them renovate to then
sell for huge profits. Exploring the place, Sally finds a secret basement
and in it a sealed furnace, voices from within which seem to call for her.
Sally is fascinated by this, but nobody she's telling about the voices
tends to believe her. So she opens the furnace ... Soon all kinds of
creepy things happen, like all of Kim's dresses being torn up and the
like, and Sally soon figures it must have been done by some little people
that were hidden in the furnace, but this time the grownups not only not
believe her, they even blame everything that happens on her - and get her
a psychiatrist (Nicholas Bell). Of course, the psychiatrist can't help her
one bit, because the story of the little people is actually true, and
Sally grows more and more afraid of them, of the place they are living in,
of everything. Only Kim figures whatever it is that troubles Sally must
be more than just her imagination borne from her sudden move, and she
investigates, finding out that the former owner of the house had actually
lost his son to ... well, something. And his drawings of whatever-it-was
resemble those of Sally to the t. Kim finds out that the beings are some
kind of dark fairies with a predilection for children's teeth (twisted
toothfairies, actually), and whenever they get from their world into ours,
they must take a life, preferably that of a child ... After much to and
fro, everything leads to a finale in the basement. The fairies have almost
managed to drag Sally down into the furnace that's the entrance to their
realm, but ultimately, Kim gives her life for the girl ... A remake of the 1973
made-for-TV film of the same name that adds cinematic scale,
fluid camerawork, a new main character, an elaborate (if unnecessary)
divorce-kid subplot and pretty decent CGI effects to the original, but other than
that - and despite a certain playfulness typical for writer/producer
Guillermo del Toro - the film comes across as rather old-fashioned, a bit
run-of-the-mill even. But let's take the film by its own merits:
Actually it's whoever plays Sally who makes or breaks the film, and Bailee
Madison does a pretty good job bringing her to life. She's supported
by the usually not very reliable Katie Holmes, who certainly had one of her
better days when filming this, while Guy Pearce remains as pale as his
role. Unfortunately, all three are pitted against a not very original
screenplay that's full of plotholes, CGI effects that not always hit the
target and most of the time work against the movie's atmosphere, and a very
predictable finale. All of this doesn't make the film a real disaster, it's
actually fairly ok - but at the same time it's also pointless
genre entertainment you will probably have troubles remembering in 2 weeks
time ...
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find Don't Be Afraid of the Dark at adultvideouniverse.com
