Darkness Rising

When the legend that is Ted Raimi appeared on screen after the opening credits I was awash with a feeling that I was about to watch something good. Sadly however it was not meant to be and I was presented with this realisation within no more than 15 minutes.

You know those over-convoluted horrors which make the rules up as they go along, make no real sense and are generally pretty damn appalling? This is one of those.

A girl returns to her childhood home with her friends, the home where her mother went crazy and tried to kill her when she was a child. Then spooky things begin to go on around the house and it all gets bad, but more for the viewer for the trio.

Messy unlikeable tripe.

The Good:

Looks the part

The Bad:

Makes no sense

Why do the characters keep repeating themselves?

Things I learnt from this movie:

Nothing, in fact if anything I lost brain cells

Was drawn into seeing 'Darkness Rising', with as said for many films seen an intriguing if not exactly novel premise and as someone with a general appreciation for horror. That it was low-budget, which from frequent personal experience is rarely a good sign due to that there are so many poor ones out there, made me though apprehensive.

'Darkness Rising', simply put, turned out to be a terrible film and waste of potential with next to no redeeming values and so much done catastrophically wrong. One of the worst films seen in a while, which is saying a lot for somebody who on the most part has been encouraged by their film/television watching and has more often than that been quite generous. Decent idea, horrendous execution.

Lets start with one positive. The scenery is atmospheric, if wasted by the schlocky way the film is shot and particularly edited.

However, the story does feel over-stretched and some of it feels vague, under-explained in the last third where the film especially became duller, more predictable, more senseless and less scary. Too many characters are too sketchy and with nowhere near enough to make one want to endear to them. Their irritating and illogical decision making and behaviours frustrate. Making the film feel bland and forgettable with not enough heart put into it. The acting is pretty bad to put it lightly and the effects are ropy at best.

Dialogue can be stilted and rambling, not to mention far too exposition-heavy, while the pace is uneven, dragging in a lot of the first half, which goes on forever and fails to get going, and never is it exciting after a truly irrelevant beginning. Found too many the supposedly shocking moments not surprising or scary and the supposedly creepy atmosphere dreary, due to the excessive obviousness and the lack of tension and suspense. Too many elements are introduced, and then dropped, barely explored or don't go anywhere, sometimes even all three.

A lot of the film completely fails to make sense, both in underdeveloped plot elements and often nonsensical and confusing character motivations. There is a lot of choppiness and lack of coherence. The threat is poorly used and poses very little threat. The film completely peters out with an ending that felt like an afterthought.

All in all, terrible. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Cannot even convey how horribly lame this production was. Gotta give em credit tho, they managed to find three actors equal to the task put before them. Did I mention, it's really .....bad. Does not contain "spoilers"- not possible, really bad.

This movie was a struggle to sit through. Before i continue I want to make it clear i'm not gonna trash this movie for the heck of it, i'm usually pretty good at giving movies the benefit of the doubt (I watched "The last air bender" 3 times). I have watched a lot of horror movies, some good, some bad. This was without a doubt one of the worst ones yet.

The story was bad, the acting was bad, the script was bad, the cinematography was bad, the props were bad and, the special effects were bad.

Darkness rising had a total of 2 scary/Creepy scenes with a combined length of 45 seconds (and that's generous). There are so many of the plot devices that just goes unexplained, most of them actually. They try to explain it towards the end of the movie but fail horribly, partly because the acting and script is so bad it's hard to actually listen. Oh, and i have never seen a weaker character in any other movie, about 30-40 min into it, the main character, Madison, starts to cry and LITERALLY does not stop for the next 45 min, every line she has is said crying and she is basically helpless and just screams for her boyfriend, Jake, to help her and the ONE time he asks for her help, she hides (while crying).

Frankly the only good thing about Darkness rising was the credits, great roll speed, great font and font size, great spacing and fantastic spelling.

Please do not waste time and money on this.

The scariest thing about this movie is that people actually edited it and thought it was fit for the human public. A horror movie does not have to have a huge budget but I would think that when it comes to the actors the purse strings shouldn't be so tight. Where in tarnation did they get the Madison character? My cat could have put on a better performance. For most of the movie she did this awful sobbing voice whine for about 85% of the movie. Someone mentioned her awful portrayal of a limp and they were spot on, it was like she thought she was doing improv or something. I cant believe her bio states that she went to a performing arts school? The dog in the movie was more convincing than her. The script only made matters worse. Was the writer under character limits? Many lines in the movie were repeated several times in many scenes, I had the captions on so I literally could see that the script was full of the actors repeating themselves and with the same awful intonations each time. The plot is so stupid and could have been forgiven id the movie had hired writers and real actors instead of their neighbors.

I am very much upset I picked this out to watch on my night off. tsk tsk,