Director Robert Harmon’s 2002 film came out of nowhere and quickly crawled back there after about a week in my local multiplex.
The film then had an unusually long hiatus by today’s standards before receiving a video and DVD release, and it’s a shame as this had a lot of
potential.
Echoing ‘Darkness Falls’, the film opens with a young boy being terrorised at night by monsters in his closet and under his bed.
We then jump ahead 19 years and are introduced to grad student Julia Lund (Laura Regan) who studies psychology.
We soon discover that Julia and Billy (the young boy featured in the
opening sequence, who is now in his 20’s) have been friends since they
were children, as they both suffered from extreme night terror’s,
following tragic events in their childhood.
A new tradgedy occurs and Julia begins to suffer from a new bout of night terrors, and that’s when ‘They’ come back.
It has been well publicised in genre circles that the film had a troubled production (at least 10 writer’s worked on the script, and the finished
product bears almost no resemblance to the original idea by the writer)
but it is nonetheless watchable.
The cast are excellent and the aesthetics are good too. Robert Harmon knows how to build tension, and does, but the script never really allows
him to fully capitalize on his potential.
Whilst the film exists in many different versions, each with alternate openings and endings as well as additional scenes, the DVD is bare bones
and we are only treated to the trailer and the original ending, which is
not that different to the current one.
OVERALL SUMMARY
The film had a lot of potential, but I suspect that it suffered from a lot
of ‘studio involvement’. Hopefully, the just announced sequel will be
able to make up for some of this film’s problems. Worth a watch but
unfortunately, ‘Darkness Falls’ got all the publicity and was too much
competition. Hopefully, this will find an audience over the years and
become a cult film.
