As "Darkness Falls" gets underway it quickly gets to the business of establishing its own bogeyman myth to justify the horror antics that will soon follow. It’s "The Sixth Sense" meets a Stephen King-inspired Northeastern town, right down to an MPAA ‘PG-13’ rating achieved through editing (instead of a clever script). A messed-up montage tells us that 150 years ago a nice old woman, Matilda Nixon, was unjustly accused of the disappearance of two children just because she happened to be close to them as the town’s self-appointed Tooth Fairy. Her skin scarred by a fire that forced her to wear a porcelain mask to prevent the sun from burning her, Matilda cursed the town and children that she once loved. This curse comes back to haunt young Kyle Walsh one evening when darkness (and the mysterious creature that inhabits it) kills the young man’s mother, sending him into a path of psychiatric treatment that still haunts Kyle even as a grown man 12 years later.

Played by non-entity Chaney Kley as an adult, Kyle is forced to confront his trauma when childhood friend Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) asks him to help her deal with her young brother Michael (Lee Cornie). Apparently the same Tooth Fairy witch (AKA Matilda Nixon) that killed Kyle’s mom is threatening to kill the young boy, who refuses to sleep and could suffer irreparable mental harm if his panic isn’t properly treated. Kyle’s return to town (which is named after the movie BTW) causes a chain reaction in which townspeople (like Grant Piro’s Matt, Sullivan Stapleton’s Matt, etc.) treat him with either disrespect or a condescending attitude. But, as the Tooth Fairy Witch begins dispatching anyone unlucky enough to step into a place dark enough to shut out light completely (a MRI scanning machine, a forest, a blacked out hospital hallway, etc.), Kyle and Caitlin emerge as the only people ready and willing to take on Matilda Nixon. Time is running out for Caitlin’s young brother though, and only by facing up to Matilda in a face-to-face showdown atop a lighthouse can Kyle (a) save the boy and (b) put an end to his battered emotional turmoil.

"Darkness Falls" quickly wastes its potentially cool premise (a witch that used to be good and was forced into revenge mode by the unjust way she was treated) into derivative, pointless and dull chase scenes in which we’re only shown split-second shots of Matilda doing her thing. Whether intended or not the movie feels rushed and badly-paced, almost as if the movie was meant to be an ‘R’ rated horror movie that was cut down at the last second to fit the ‘PG-13’ criteria. Then there are the patented moments of brain-dead idiocy that are meant to make an audience scream in disgust at the characters, but which in "Darkness Falls" feel redundant given how little sympathy the cast evokes toward the characters (particularly the little kid been chased by Matilda). In one jaw-dropping moment of collective idiocy by everyone involved (including director Jonathan Liebesman and his three screenwriters) Kyle, Caitlin and Michael escape the Tooth Fairy by using a hospital elevator that works despite the clearly-established fact that there is a total energy blackout in the building (Ch.21). "The Ring" and "Signs" come across as "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Casablanca" compared to this derivative, dull, soulless and depressing ‘PG-13’ so-called horror flick!

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