The Dark (2005)
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Movie Reviews of The Dark (2005)
Movie Review: pretty good
Summary: 3 Stars
Started out interesting, slowed some during the middle when the girl showed up, then started to pick back up. My problem is, unless I missed it, is that they never explained why the ghost girl was the way she was other than "she brought something back". Why did sheep die when she was around? The ending was okay if a bit abrupt. Who was the creepy guy shown in the last frame with the mother. Overall this was better and more thought out than the Ring. Pretty good, worth seeing once. Beautiful setting though.Movie Review: I was scared to death
Summary: 3 Stars
At first look, the title and the poster is reminiscent of B movie material....but noo was I wrong. The setting, the storyline, the sound effects and the directing was immaculate. Take it from me, I am a horror movie maniac, and I have disdainfully knighted myself as someone who is never really shocked anymore, but this movie was really a very disturbing surprise. Thats the right term, this movie was very disturbing for me.Movie Review: can't fine stars
Summary: 3 Stars
I looked this movie up on line & it said that Richard Jaeckel & Cathy Lee Crosby were in it but I could not find either one of them. I was wondering if anyone else did.Movie Review: Some Creepy Images Damaged by Confusing Story and Uninvolving Characters
Summary: 2 Stars
In spite of its creepy atmosphere and clever psychological subtest, `The Dark' fails to truly scare us as a whole because of its formulaic storytelling in its first half, and the clever but confusing narrative in the second. I'm not saying the film is a total failure, but after watching recent horror films inspired or influenced by Asian and Spanish horrors (like `The Ring'), `The Dark' seems to lack something intriguing in its narrative to draw us into the occult world it tries to present to us.
Still the story begins promisingly when a mother Adele (Maria Bello) and her daughter Sarah arrives at a remote house by the sea in Wales, where Sarah's estranged father James (Sean Bean) lives alone. On their way, however, the two travelers find something weird by the cliff. It could be a monolith or gravestone, on which a strange word is curved in Welsh, and Adele just cannot shake off uneasy premonition since then. Actually something very bad happens, and the girl really goes missing.
[TOO FAMILIAR SCARE TACTICS] John Fawcett (known for his much better `Ginger Snaps') continues his story with the mother's lonely and desperate battle to take back her daughter she knows she should have cared more. The story itself is interesting together with her fear of losing the daughter to James suggested in the beginning, but the problems is, for all the eerie atmosphere of the seaside or the local history, what Adele does is in fact much more unbelievable than the story of the cursed videotape of `The Ring' (with which `The Dark' shares some elements). Moreover, the films relies on clichéd items like haunted little girl, character researching in the library, or dream sequences. To make matters worse, the busy editing sometimes fail to show what is going on there.
But the real reason I was hugely disappointed with `The Dark' is probably that the film is not emotionally involving at all. The missing daughter is not particularly a nice girl, and what should we care if she goes missing in the film? Or how about her mother who ill-treats her in flashbacks? As the film gets closer to the end, however, Maria Bello with her powerful acting manages to make us care, and that's why the film ending (original or alternate alike) works. But sadly, the film is almost over by then.
Movie Review: This movie should have been so, so much better than it is.
Summary: 2 Stars
The Dark (John Fawcett, 2005)
Fawcett (Ginger Snaps) has found most of the work as a TV director, but he does make the occasional feature film, and for the most part, those feature films are ignored by the public and as excellent as you'd expect given that fact. So it seemed to me that Fawcett directing an adaptation of Simon Maginn's stellar novel Sheep was a guaranteed shot out of the park. That was unfortunately not the case, thanks mostly to Stephen Massicotte (Ginger Snaps Back)'s screenplay, but it certainly doesn't deserve the oblivion it has been relegated to in the years since its release.
James (Sean Bean, recently of Silent Hill) and Adele (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor's Maria Bello) have recently lost their daughter Sarah, who drowned. Soon after, where they are visited by Ebril (Abigail Stone in her first screen role), a girl who claims to have drowned sixty years before. Could this be the spirit, or the reincarnation, of Sarah?
The concept of Annwn is not unknown to Americans, thanks mostly to Lloyd Alexander's tales of Taran, steeped in the same mythology that guides The Dark. And since the movie was made for a British audience, you'd think they'd have done something a bit more advanced than Annwn 101. Yet that's pretty much what we get here, and the balance that comes from the tension in the novel is erased (there's one scene, especially, that's noticeably absent from the film that worked very, very well in the book, the midnight flight to the doctor's house). Plotwise, this one feels almost phoned in. Yet Fawcett's distinct sense of atmosphere remains in this movie, even when it goes far, far over the edge of cheesiness in its climax. Fawcett knows how to create a scene, and he does it as well here as he ever has; pity there's so little substance to go with the style. A major disappointment. **