Review - Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

I watch a lot of horror movies.

So that old "suspension of disbelief" thing is pretty much standard fare for me.  I have no problem with men in rubber suits being the monster, because that's the best special effects we had in movies for many years.  I am used to seeing that on the screen.  What I don't like in a horror movie are things that just don't make sense and that have no explanation.

So I watched Don't be Afraid of the Dark on netflix last night.  Now, I like Guillermo del Toro (i think he was the director on this one?) but this one didn't seem to go over so well on me.  The story seemed fairly decent, I mean, you got evil fairies, stolen children, a really nice goddamn house in the middle of nowhere, all seemingly good elements for the tale.  But it all sort of falls apart when you try to mix it together.  Spoilers to follow, but I won't try to give everything away.

So here's the basics.  Little girl goes to live with her dad for no apparent reason.  Dad is in the middle of refurbishing an old mansion.  Old mansion was the site of a murder-disappearance some time in the distant past involving a famous artist.  Famous artist painted nothing his whole life but realistic nature scenes, until the months before his death, when all he painted was demonic little fairies.  Little fairies live in a big old furnace in the cellar, which is found and opened shortly after the little girl comes to live there.

Now the plot of the movie isn't hard to figure out in the first ten minutes or so, so I really haven't given anything away here.  What we do have are some glaring problems that I just can't figure out.

First thing, the story is set in modern times, as far as I can tell.  They are driving modern cars and using modern cell phones throughout the movie, so there's no flashbacks or time displacements or anything like that.  And yet, at some point in the movie, the little girl is given a polaroid camera with obvious flashbulbs in it, the kind that spit out those old timey photographs that take several minutes to develop when you leave them lying out in the light.  I would swear those things disappeared in the 90's, but maybe I am wrong?  In any case, it looks ridiculously out of place in this movie, when there are cell phones everywhere.

Second thing, nobody believes the little girl's story about the evil fairies.  Which isn't unusual in these sorts of movies, but there's so much evidence that it's NOT the little girl that's doing these things that I can't understand why the parents aren't even vaguely suspicious.  In fact, there's a foreman helping out restoring the house, who gets stabbed, mauled, and nearly killed in the basement by the fairies.  And... they call it an accident.  The man comes staggering up from the basement, bleeding profusely in a hundred places, yanking a half-scissor blade out of the BACK of his shoulder, and....  oh, he had an accident.  poor guy.  Must have slipped and ROLLED THROUGH A FIELD OF BROKEN TOOLS OR SOMETHING...  Yea, that makes sense.

Third, going back to the polaroid camera.  So the little girl uses the camera to get a picture of the fairies.  PROOF AT LAST!  So she's waiting for the picture to develop at a dinner party with a dozen people, and they steal the picture from her and rip it up so there's no proof.  Wait, what?  This makes absolutely no sense in half a dozen different ways.  The fairies hate light, yet there supposedly under the table, which could not have been got under without going through bright light.  Also, there's a dozen people having dinner at the table.. nobody noticed the fairies scampering under the table, or moved a foot and bumped one of them?  Then the little girl has the photo sitting on the table to develop,. and the adults next to her keep looking at it and she keeps pulling it away from them.  Why?  If she's trying to prove the fairies are real, isn't that what she wants?  Then the fairies take the picture, which was apparently their goal, and rip it up.  The fairies haven't been above ground in dozens if not hundreds of years...  Yet apparently they understand pictures and cameras enough to know to destroy the evidence?  Wtf?

Fourth, and continuing this polaroid thing, which is like an albatross around this movie's neck.  The little girl has an encounter with the fairies in the library.  She takes dozens of pictures of them as they attack her, and they are scattered piecemeal all over the library with the books and tipped over furniture.  There's no way the fairies found and destroyed them all in that chaos, and the little girl even manages to kill one of the fairies, which leaves it's SEVERED ARM lying on the floor.  And yet...  still.. apparently no evidence that there are any such things as fairies, still no one believes her and everyone thinks she's nuts.  Haven't the PARENTS ever heard of suspension of disbelief?  Holy crap.  If cavemen were that dense, humans would have gone extinct out of sheer stupidity before movies were ever invented.  I can just picture the maid cleaning up that mess.  "What are all these pictures of evil fairies?  What's this tiny severed arm lying on the floor?  Eh, just garbage I guess!"

Fifth, something I just don't get, there's a whole series of pictures done in the extensive garden, where there's a round thing made of antlers that just looks weird.  There's also a painting the basement of a child being caught in something that looks just like a ball of antlers.  They make a huge deal of it, since it's apparently the last picture the famous artist painted who apparently was killed by the fairies.  So... what the HELL does it have to do with anything?  As far as I can tell, it has absolutely nothing to do with any other part of the story.  It has no apparent significance.  it's not used by the fairies for anything, there's no inference that it has anything to do with them, and as far as I can tell, no fairies even go near the damn thing throughout the length of the film.  So why the FUCK does a famous artist, who is apparently living out his last months as a prisoner to the fairies, paint a picture of it for absolutely no damn reason?  Nobody knows!  I sure don't.

Sixth, something else that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and that just occurred to me...  the artist paints dozen of pictures of these fairies, leaves sketches and paintings of them in the cellar where the fairies are, and the little girl even draws pictures of them (she's an artist, too) and yet, none of the fairies ever destroy THOSE pictures.  Which, they would certainly understand a lot better than photographs, and see a lot more often since they were, you know, IN THE CELLAR WITH THEM...  But no, the fairies left those.  Yep!  Because they are just paintings, not actual photographs, despite being infinitely more detailed than the actual blurry photographs, which apparently had to be destroyed.  lol  Total contradiction there.

Seventh.  Don't read this one, it's a pretty bad spoiler if you want to watch the film, but it bugs the shit out of me.  It's the end of the film.  The fairies are pulling the little girl into the furnace.  Not to burn her, they just kidnap children and it's the way to the fairy land, so they've got a rope around her and they are dragging her through the cellar.  She's resisting.  She's like 5 or whatever, and she's a dozen times bigger and stronger than the fairies, but there's a lot of them so maybe they are strong enough to pull her in.  The guy's girlfriend (katie holmes) puts one leg on each side of the rope and turns sideways, trapping the rope long enough to cut through it.  So the girl's free.  Now, instead of the rope just, you know, slipping through her legs, it starts pulling her.  She could just stop it two seconds ago, but now she's not strong enough, ebcause apparently it drags HER down?  And the rope pulls so damn hard it snaps her leg backwards, breaking the bone?  Wtf?  What, the fairies combined into voltron-fairy and gave the rope a good yank?  And the rope is coated with fairy-stickum so it's got her legs now?  No fucking sense.

Anyway, if the movie had made a bit more sense, it might have been pretty good.  The fairies were sufficiently scary in a old-timey-sidhe-dark-faery sort of fashion, and katie Holmes played the guy's girlfriend.  I have referred to her and her boyfriend as the girl's parents here, because the girl's mother never makes an appearance, and for all intents and purposes, katie is the girl's new mom.

Normally this would have been pretty cool, since I remember cute little katie holmes from Dawson's creek, but this woman almost doesn't even resemble her.  I'm not really sure what happened to her in the last 9 years (besides her marriage to tom cruise), but she's gone from a cute 20-year-old who looks 16 to an ANCIENT LOOKING 34 YEAR OLD.  I swear she could have passed for 45 in this flick.  I don't know if they were trying to make her look older with extensive makeup (again, for no apparent reason) or she just looks that old, but if so, she's aged incredibly in the last 9 years.

By the way, "sidhe" isn't a typo up there.  The sidhe (or "shee" as I believe it's pronounced) is the name of the race of faeries as they were referred to in gaelic, I believe.  As the stories go, they were a very dark, very badass race of beings that modern-day elves and fairies were based on.  Of course, like Grimm's fairy tales, they got changed a bit going from east to west.  If you don't understand the reference, Grimm's fairy tales were warnings to small children to get them to behave... dark, gruesome tales meant to scare children into keeping away from the woods (where actual wolves still dwelt at the time).  For instance, little red riding hood was actually killed in the original germanic version of the tale, torn apart by "grandma" wolf when red riding hood went to visit her.  There was no woodsman who saved red by killing the wolf with an axe until the tale came over to the states.  Here, we civilized it, because we are a sucker for happy endings.  Much the same with the sidhe.  They were never cute, they never flitted about on glittery wings.  They stole babies, either to feast on them or turn them into more faeries, and once they were gone, you let the kids go.  Anyone who went into a faerie-hole to go after them, never came back.  if that's not a tale to scare little kids into staying safe at home, I don't know what is.

See?  You do learn something new every day.  I didn't even have to look that up, that's just somethign I happen to know, probably from watching too many horror movies!  lol

On a sadder note, my buddy Rich has been missing in Australia for 3 months.  I'm certain one of three things has happened.  Either he was slain by a ravenous pack of giant funnel web spiders, his serial-killer wife made it LOOK like he was killed by a pack of giant funnel web spiders, or he couldn't afford his internet bill anymore and it got shut off.  Sure, I know, the third explanation is the more likely of the three, but that makes for horrible drama.  I prefer to think of rich bravely fighting off a pack of giant funnel web spiders, perhaps armed with one of those swinging bolo things from the Crocodile dundee movies, and almost overcoming them when his devious wife stabs him in the back and feeds him to them because she's their QUEEN.  It's just so much cooler!

Bye Rich!  I'll miss you, buddy!  I'd say I'll avenge your murder, but honestly...  spiders, and women for that matter, scare the shit out of me.  (shudders)  You're on your own!