Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

Pretty Good

Boring

Admirable film.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Whether the monsters were real or not doesn't matter. Their daughter was obviously terrified to remain in the house. Either leave the house or send the poor little girl back to her moms. But no, let's make sure she is psychologically scarred permanently! Overall it was a cute movie. More of a family movie, at least for older kids, than it is a horror movie. The creatures just aren't that scary. Looks like you could kick them across the room or twist their little necks!! Very similar to other movies but worth the watch. The little girl was very impressive with her acting, better than a lot of adults!

I admit, it is a problem having a video night and watching one poor movie after another .. you almost expect the worst.However, this movie is bad. It is not at all suspenseful, it has quite terrible acting (which is a surprise considering the actors are by no means B-actors), bad, bad CGI .. and most prominently .. a really bad story!At its core, it is a redemption patchwork family movie .. with creatures. Sadly though, the family drama never exceeds "tele-novela" drama quality .. and the creatures themselves are about as scary as muppets. At no point the threat of those creatures feels serious in any way. They only thing they do benefit from is the clumsiness of the protagonists (the usual problem of protagonists being unable to run a straight line without falling to the ground, or fumble a key ... or make it from a room normal sized living room in less than 5 minutes.Stay away from this movie, it is terrible .. and sadly not "so bad, its good"...

Nigel McKeand's cult 1973 TV-movie "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" was so brief and so low on budget that the intricacies of its plot had to be rushed through to beat the clock. It was a scary little item that begged to be expanded upon, which is what writers Guillermo del Toro (who also co-produced) and Matthew Robbins have done, but what was once compact feels overblown and bloated here. The adult couple from '73, renovating an old manor with evil creatures hiding down the ash bin of a bricked-over fireplace, have now become a financially-insecure (!) single dad and his decorator-girlfriend refurbishing a Gothic mansion, a woodland estate with a maze-like backyard of fountains and gardens and its own waterfall. The central character is no longer the wife but the divorced dad's miserable pre-teen daughter, unhappy about being shuffled around and not about to make friends with dad's new love. The differences between an adult woman being terrorized in her home by devious little creatures and a curious but frightened child are tremendous: first, we have to slog through the kid's psychological issues, then we must endure her ear-piercing little-girl screams, but not before getting a diagnosis from the clueless adults that she's just imagining things. In context, this may be perfectly normal behavior from concerned grown-ups, but normal rarely equals scary. There's not even a semblance of surprise or suspense in this screenplay; everything is whittled down to its basics so that we can admire the film's tony quality, CGI effects and high-end budget. The camera investigates all the crooks and crevices of this spread, floating up hallways and down staircases and around dark corners. We get quite a tour of the place, all the while waiting for the people on-screen to catch up to the kid, who has a long way to go before she catches up to us. *1/2 from ****

After moving into a new house in the countryside, a young girl discovers the area home to a race of diminutive beings who need to feed on human teeth to survive and must convince her parents to help her stop them.This is quite a decent enough effort that does have enough going for it to make it work. The main thing going for this one is the fact that house itself is used to build the kind of atmosphere and presence that gives this a rather impressive amount of suspense throughout this. By being the kind of location that can accurately keep the creatures hidden so well as it does here by utilizing the darkened hallways, light-less rooms and generally creepy layout this gives off, it has the perfect hiding locations to allow the creatures to stay a rather impressive force by having them know the lay-out so that there's an advantage to them that's not available elsewhere. That gives this a few rather impressive attack scenes throughout this with there being the basement brutalizing and the ambush in the bathroom to give this a rather spectacular air about it to having the kind of action required to stay invested here. As well, the final half which is the assault on the dinner party and the guests there is quite a bit of fun and really works quite well, helped by the swarm of creatures there but also managing to get plenty of high-end spectacle coming from this so it all works out quite well. These do help somewhat to overcome the few flaws in here, though nothing overcomes the factor of having the father be so utterly clueless and careless towards his daughter's claims. The blatant dismissals here generally feel solely there to provide an excuse to stay in the house and keep the plot rolling along rather than out of any general kind of rational behavior on his part, as the kind of sequences ushered throughout here are far more worthy of investigation on his part and these are brushed off quite simply to move the plot along so these are quite unbelievable. As well, the constantly-changing tone of the creatures here is somewhat confusing, since it gives them a reverence and feel towards their behavior and general appearance that reads more like a fantasy than a straightforward horror effort so there's a rather alarming clash against the brutal and vicious actions they undergo here. It doesn't help the CGI looks atrocious and off throughout here as they rarely interact well with their surroundings and the size changes throughout, but when they have a whimsical attitude towards someone here only to suddenly swarm them with knives and surgical tools to violently begin hacking them to pieces, it's differing moods is a big problem. Otherwise, this one isn't so bad.Rated R: Violence, Language and continuous children-in-jeopardy.