The Ring which is possibly one of the most successful horror films in years, capitalized it's success by being a PG-13 horror film and broadening it's target audience. After seeing this and the success Dreamworks enjoyed many studios were probably thinking to themselves, why can't we do the same? So at this point any studio that could throw out a PG-13 horror movie, was willing to do so without hesitation. It seems this was the case with Darkness Falls, but unfortunately this was a roller coaster that only went one way... down.

Over a 150 years ago in a sleepy little town of Darkness Falls, an elderly woman named Matilda Dixon (Antony Burrows) took care of the children in the town. They all loved her as she cared for them, and she loved them as well. As the children of Darkness Falls would loose their teeth, she would collect them and gave a them a golden coin in exchange much like the tooth fairy. Soon things would change though as a fire breaks out and Matilda was left horribly scarred as a result. The burn marks on her face hurt so much when they were exposed to sunlight she could only go out at night. Being self-conscience of her appearance she wore a porcelian mask to hide her scars. When two children didn't come home from their journey to her house, Matilda was blamed and hung later that day. The next day the 2 children were found unharmed, and the town swept their little secret under a carpet for years. Her ghost was said to have placed a curse upon the town, which on the day a child would lose their final baby tooth she would come for it, and if anyone were to see her face, she would kill them.

Kyle (Chaney Kley) never believed the stories, and many kids thought it was just made up to scare them that the tooth fairy would come to collect their final baby tooth. He didn't believe that if you gaze at her face she would take revenge on you, but now her mother is dead as she had seen the tooth fairy, and he is blamed for her death. Fast forward 12 years, and Kyle is in Las Vegas and receives a phone call from an old friend in Darkness Falls whose brother is afraid of the dark, and is seeing the tooth fairy, can he help them so that the curse of the tooth fairy doesn't continue?

Darkness Falls had so much potential, it had a nicely executed beginning, and from there on it slowly went down hill. The script was trying to be funny as lines were being thrown in to comment about Kyle being psychotic after the death of his mother. It also started rushing into the characters as if we were supposed to know who they were. There were a few scenes in the movie that were cool, and the CGI was very nicely done.

The main flaw with Darkness Falls is that it seemed as if they rushed it out into theaters (even though it was delayed), it seemed like they edited out so much gore that it could easily make a PG-13 rating. There are very few reasons to edit a movie so poorly, if only to get a PG-13 rating. If that's the type of movie the studio wants, well then, they should go to another studio. And to add to the fact that the film was only 75 minutes long really pissed me off.

After hearing all the positive reviews I thought that this could be the first good horror movie of 2003, but I was dead wrong. I'm hoping that either May or Final Destination 2 makes up for the bomb that this film is.