Star Rating:

The Darkness

Director: Greg Mclean

Actors: Radha Mitchell, Jennifer Morrison, Lucy Fry

Release Date: Friday 13th May 2016

Genre(s): Horror

Running time: 100 minutes

The worst crime a horror film can be accused for is being boring. That goes for any film, to be honest.

However, horror films and its actors, writers and directors seem to forget that they have an entire arsenal at their disposal which should prevent this. A horror film can shock you, outrage you, humour you and entertain you. The Darkness does none of these things, except for sucking an hour and a half out of your life that you're never getting back.

Kevin Bacon - who, frankly, should know better than this - leads his family on an excursion to the Grand Canyon whereupon his autistic son, Gotham's David Mazouz, finds a bunch of stones that are also Native American demons that somehow signify the end of the world. Yes, The Darkness goes there. Bringing the stones back with him, the family slowly begins to disintegrate. Radha Mitchell, Bacon's wife, struggles to deal with her son's erratic behaviour and begins to drink again. Lucy Fry, their daughter, is turning to bulimia whilst Bacon finds his eye wandering to an assistant at his... design firm? It's never made clear. Paul Reiser's his boss, though. Paul Reiser. As in Mad About You / Aliens / Whiplash Paul Reiser. Yeah.

As mentioned, the worst thing a horror film can do is bore you, but the reality here is that The Darkness doesn't just bore you, but it does it so aggressively that it becomes tiresome watching it. All the usual cliches of horror are at work here. We have Ghostly Figure Walking Behind Character™, we have Fog-Horn Noise As Atmosphere™ and we even have the old favourite of Weird Child Who Can Commune With Ghosts™. Yes, each and every tired and well-worn trope is walked out and shown to us with the subtlety of a hammer to the face.

Kevin Bacon rightfully looks embarrassed to be associated with the whole thing, as does Paul Reiser and Radha Mitchell. Lucy Fry doesn't really have much to do other than look scared whilst David Mazouz's role in the film consists of walking away from the main group to, you guessed it, Comune With The Ghosts™. Greg McLean directed the half-decent - if hugely controversial - Wolf Creek back in 2005, so it's strange to see him go from a film which completely subverted the genre to something like this, which is the worst cliches of it. There's absolutely no sense of atmosphere to The Darkness and the script is replete with flat, uninspired dialogue that grates constantly.

Avoid at all costs.