Darkness Falls
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Actor: Anita Dobson, Bryan Pringle, Ray Winstone, Sherilyn Fenn, Tim DuttonBrand: Lions Gate
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-04-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate
DVD Reviews of Darkness Falls
DVD Review: Good cast, decent script, bad director.
Summary: 3 Stars
Darkness Falls (Gerry Lively, 1999)
Darkness Falls has suddenly become a very popular name for films; since 1998, at least six movies containing that phrase in the title have been made (including two, yes two, 2006 movies entitled When Darkness Falls, a Finnish thriller from Anders Nilsson and an Australian indie mystery). I'm not 100% certain, but I also seem to recall at least one book with that name being made into a movie with a different title; just can't remember it off the top of my head. In any case, when you grab something called Darkness Falls, you never know what you're going to get. The one I ended up with is a 1999 British thriller with a stunning cast and a really, really bad director (Lively has since been responsible for such immortal celluloid as Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God and The Art of War III: Retribution, while in his capacity as a cinematographer he has lensed equally brilliant movies such as Future Shock and Hellraiser: Bloodline). Could have gone either way, I guess. And when you get right down to it, it kind of did.
Adapted by John Howlett (the last writing credit to date for the man behind Lindsay Anderson's immortal If...) from a play by N. J. Crisp (one of the writers for much-loved British TV drama Secret Army), Darkness Falls is the tale of the Driscolls, Mark (The Bourne Identity's Tim Dutton) and Sally (Twin Peaks' Sherilynn Fenn). We learn in the opening scene that Mark is involved with some very bad people, and he's hosting a dinner party this night to try and raise some money to get them off his back. But while he's on his way home, a neighbor, John Barrett (the indomitable Ray Winstone, recently of Edge of Darkness... playing much the same character, now that I think about it), drops in to see Sally, and hangs around for Mark... at which point he imprisons them in a room and lays out a theory that Mark was in the car on the day Barrett's wife suffered a horrible car accident that's left her in a coma. From here, if you've seen Twelve Angry Men, you've got a pretty good idea where this is going.
It's not a bad little movie, truly. It certainly could have been worse. While Sherilyn Fenn made some choices that seemed bad at the time (Boxing Helena, which is not nearly as awful as everyone makes it out to be, and Two Moon Junction, which is), she's always been a capable actress, not to mention a very attractive one, and the ten years between Twin Peaks and Darkness Falls did nothing to blunt her appeal on either front. Ray Winstone has been a go-to actor among those in the know for a long, long time now (while the double-whammy of Nil by Mouth and Face in 1997 really brought him into the public consciousness, he's been around long enough to have acted in Quadrophenia), and once again he shows why. The only really flat performance comes from Dutton, and even he shows few glimmers of life in flashbacks, but not enough to propel the film. Which brings up an interesting idea; had Lively done more to examine the developing relationship between Sally and John, this could have not only been a cracking suspense flick, but a much more original one than it is. Still, Fenn and Winstone do their best, and while you can't say there's a surprise ending (after all, there are only two possible ways to answer the question, so half of you will have it right before you pop the movie into the DVD player), the journey's the thing, and it's not a bad one. Worth checking out. ** ½
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