Brian
and Kelly ought to a highly compatible couple. They both work with their hands.
He is a carpenter and she is a massage therapist. To be licensed, her knowledge
of physiology and anatomy is practically equal to that of an RN. Unfortunately,
he still regards her career choice as little more than prostitution. Yes, they
were having a rough patch in their marriage, even before they moved into the
evil house where families mysteriously die. Kelly will try to save her daughter
from the malevolent force while her husband goes completely nuts in Patrick
DeLuca’s House of Darkness (promo here), which premieres this Sunday
on the Lifetime Movie Network.
To
save their marriage, the troubled couple and their anti-social daughter Sarah moved
to a quaint Northern California farmhouse, where they do not know anyone and
have no clients for their respective businesses. On the recommendation of their
former marriage counsellor, they will record video diaries on their laptops
until they can find someone local. Of course, this will give Brian a venue for
his freak-outs.
Right
from the start, bad things start happening. The force immediately starts
getting into Sarah’s head, but she is so weird, her parents hardly notice any
change. Brian is a different story. He starts drinking even more, sequestering
himself in his workshop. Hypocritically, he starts lusting after the Daisy
Duke-wearing neighbor, while harboring jealous fantasies about her husband. As
his instability lurches into violence, Kelly brings out a psychic to take the
house’s paranormal temperature. The results of her inspection are alarming.
There
are about thirty minutes in Darkness that
really click. They involve the psychic and a visit to a former resident doing
prison time for the supposed murder of her family. It is not exactly
groundbreaking stuff, but the execution starts to click when Kelly starts
getting proactive. The rest is a bit draggy, which is unfortunate. For a while
in the 1970s, relatively scary made-for-TV horror movies produced by the likes
of Aaron Spelling and directed by genre experts like Dan Curtis used to turn up
fairly regularly on the networks (remember Crowhaven
Farm and When Michael Calls?). It
would be nice to see the tradition revived with a post-Scream sensibility, but Darkness
is too inconsistent to be the catalyst.
At
least Sara Fletcher’s Kelly is not a terribly cringe-inducing woman-in-jeopardy
and Brittany Falardeau brings a little attitude as her sister Jamie. However,
Gunner Wright looks and sounds like a poor man’s Patrick Wilson, despite all
the scenery he chews as the supernaturally compromised Brian.
