“The Darkness” isn’t so dark after all

If you’re looking for the “on the edge of your seat” environment that “Insidious” and “Sinister” franchises had to offer, then you might be in the wrong place.

The horror movie “The Darkness” follows a family after its return from a vacation to the Grand Canyon. Peter (Kevin Bacon) is the father and an over-worked architect at a firm; Bronny (Radha Mitchell) is the mother struggling with a drinking problem; and the eldest daughter is Stephanie (Lucy Fry), who struggles with bulimia.

Their youngest son, Mikey (David Mazouz), falls into a secret underground cavern and finds five mysterious stones laid out on a pedestal accompanied by five ominous figures painted on the wall behind the pedestal.

Of course, as soon as they get home, weird things start happening. Doors open by themselves, faucets turn on and the ever-present mysterious handprints keep appearing everywhere.

The family, seemingly out of the blue, starts acting very out of character. They snap at each other more often, and Mikey seems to be exhibiting some new and strange behaviors.

He becomes very protective over his backpack, which holds the stones. Mikey seems to have made a new imaginary friend named Jenny as well.

As things are finally starting to hit home for Bronny and Peter, they hire a couple of Native American cleansers to perform a ritual on the house.

For a film that attempts to play up on an alleged dark force plaguing a family, there really is not a whole lot of darkness to be had throughout the movie. In fact, a vast majority of the film is spent with lengthy and quite frankly boring scenes.

When we finally do get some scares in, they’re mainly jump scares. This really dumbed the movie down to the point of it not being scary at all.

This is really disappointing since the five unsettling cave paintings showed a lot of potential for the ghosts. Instead, when they finally do show up, they seemed extremely out of place in the environment.

The acting isn’t all that good, either, given Kevin Bacon held his own somewhat along with young David Mazouz. But the rest of the cast gave a forced performance that didn’t seem natural at all.

The scenes were choppy as well. There were a lot of times where it’s hard to know what’s going on, and the film wasn’t giving any clues.

Overall, the movie earns a 3/10. It had potential, but they really dropped the ball by not providing much of an environment to accompany the dark forces supposedly invading this family’s world.  But at least it wasn’t the 120th “found footage” horror flick this year.