I’ve read a lot about this movie and its TV movie precursor, so I bought the DVD(-R) of the TV movie, and I watched it with my sister and her 9-year-old daughter. (I sometimes make the mistake of believing people’s rave reviews on Amazon.com.) Well, the verdict was that it’s not scary, but it’s fun and kind of cool. (This kid {my niece} isn’t scared by anything, though, so that’s not the best indicator! {I would have been scared silly by this TV movie had I seen it as a child!} But it seems like kids today have a sort of “seen it all” jaded mentality, where it’s almost un-cool to be scared by a movie. But that’s perfect, because most of these days’ horror films aren’t scary at all anyway! They’re just gross and chock full of too much CGI and sound effects, as well as too much heart-string-tugging and jolt-you-out-of-your-seat music.) So then I wanted to see the new remake, to see if they had done it justice, so I got it from NetFlix. Uh, yeah.
So first things first: I was very excited when I saw a period pre-credits sequence, because I thought it would show how the original guy had gotten the house infested with little demons by making a pact with the devil for unlimited power or something. No such luck, however, as we’re instead shown a sequence that doesn’t explain anything other than that the little monsters like to eat teeth. Guillermo del Toro had the “tooth fairies” in Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, so this must be a tip of the hat to that reference by a grateful director because del Toro is producing the movie. (del Toro also co-wrote the script, so maybe he imposed it.) Unfortunately for those who know, that just makes a little trivial connection to another movie, and hence destroys the atmosphere of the current film. But whatever. I don’t know what’s so hard about just trying to make it work well on its own terms, but I guess that’s outdated now, so we all have to have hipster references that connect everything nowadays. Lame.
Oh, and also, they have to have the CGI “camera” fly through everything in the early part of the movie, just to remind everyone that everything is fake. Lame again. But at least there is the part in the beginning after the credits where they get to the house, and Guy Pearce answers the phone and grovels for someone named “Mr. Jacoby” (!). So he works for Jacoby and Meyers, huh? No wonder he’s being tormented by demons after working for an ambulance-chasing lawsuit firm! This is his just punishment! But why did he have to subject his family to it? (Maybe so he can sue the little demons later?)
Oh, and then we get the broken family brat who won’t accept the new parent: I think this is the new movie cliché, huh? Except that it’s not new anymore, either. This just adds another layer of stuff that distracts from the demons/goblins angle. So is this supposed to be horrifying for those kids from broken homes who aren’t scared of the little monsters? I don’t know why they put this plot point in so many movies nowadays, as it simply muddies things further. When I was a kid, and we didn’t want to eat something, our parents would say: “There are starving children in (wherever they were starving at the time), you should appreciate it!” And then we’d say: “Then send it to them!” So I was hoping Guy Pearce would say to Sally when she rejected Katie Holmes: “There are children in (wherever) who don’t have any stepmothers! You should appreciate her!” And Sally could say: “Then send her to be their stepmother!”
At this point in the movie, it struck me that if these goblins like to eat children’s teeth, they ought to just set up a free children’s dental clinic or an orphanage: then they’d get lots of kids’ teeth, since children lose teeth all the time! (I mean that their baby teeth fall out, not that they get their teeth knocked out.) Plus, they wouldn’t even have to be mean to get them; but then I guess it’s not a horror movie anymore. Or, they could drive around and burgle houses for the kids’ baby teeth when families are out of town on spring break or whatever holiday; but then it’s a heist movie with little demons, and that’s not going to be a big draw, I’ll bet. (Maybe they could make a remake of Home Alone with these little monsters trying to steal the Macaulay Culkin kid’s teeth! No? But they could call it Home Alone 4 Tooth Protection! And it could be sponsored by Crest or Colgate toothpaste, and Listerine mouthwash. Still no?) Oh, whoops: did I ruin the conceit of the movie? Sorry!
Okay, so then we get to the part where Sally finds the basement, and Guy Pearce smashes through the wall, and then Sally sets the monsters free. I was hoping they would play that Police song: “Set Them Free” (“Free, free, set them free! Set them free! Free, free, set them free!”), but no dice. I wondered where Sally got the strength to remove those huge bolts from such a thick piece of metal after years and years of rust and stuff, but then I realized the writers had simply given her super-strength to make it even less believable.
So then these fake-looking CGI thingies start terrorizing Sally, but the movie still wants to dwell on the broken marriage thing, so we get more of that: Yay! It seems that Sally’s not happy in the new house and its demon infestation, but her mother doesn’t care, and naturally Guy Pearce couldn’t care less. So I don’t care either. Except that it does seem kinda odd to me that this Sally looks a lot like her step-mom (she has the same pouty lips and saggy cheeks, and she has the same hair color), and nothing like her father. No wonder Guy Pearce doesn’t feel connected to her: it’s not his daughter anyway! Maybe that’s going to be the twist ending: She’s really Suri, and Tom Cruise is really her father, and Katie Holmes is really her mother, and they did this whole elaborate ruse to trick the Paparazzi into chasing someone else’s brat every day for years. (Cheaters! It’s no wonder the kid is being hounded: these “demons/goblins” are secretly Paparazzi! And when they say they want her teeth, they just mean they want her to smile for the camera! Or maybe they want to sell her baby teeth on eBay? And maybe it's called Don't Be Afraid of the Dark because it's really the flashbulbs of Paparazzi cameras she should be afraid of! See? That gives it away right there!)
Okay, so now Katie Holmes is starting to believe the kid just because she cut up all her dresses with scissors or whatever, and she goes to the library to check up on the original house owner/designer’s documents there. It’s truly amazing that her husband, who is shown to be completely fanatical about the original house builder guy and his house and restoring it, etc., hasn’t already done this, but I guess the script writer was out to lunch for this part of the movie (!?). I mean, I could believe it if she had found something hidden, and she had to go to some obscure college professor, who only knows little bits and pieces about this one specific thing; but to have all this stuff just available at the local public library? And Guy Pearce didn’t find it before, when he’s been researching this guy and restoring the house for months? Get real! This just makes me tear my hair out at how incompetent the writing is! And I’m supposed to be focused on this story? Yeah, right!
So then we get the back story on these demon/fairy monsters, and it’s worse than I thought it would be. Without the beasties eating kids’ teeth angle, this would have been great: just say the original guy sold his soul to the devil for power, and instead he got infested with these demonic entities: great! That works really well! But no, we had to reference Hellboy 2, so it’s just dumb. Oh well. Plus, by the end of the movie, there are like 100 of these little tooth fairy monsters running around attacking everyone, so how is one child’s teeth supposed to sustain them all for another hundred years or however long it will be before someone else lives in this house? Are they going to share? Maybe one tooth for every four goblins or something? Are children’s teeth like Everlasting Gobstoppers for these creatures? This really doesn’t work at all, sorry.
I read recently that Guillermo del Toro likes the dark conception of fairies, so fine: let them be fairies rather than demons (although this does not make as much sense). But having them want children’s teeth does not work at all and it sinks the whole movie. I’m sorry, but it’s true. If you’re going to remake a previously well-loved movie, then do it right! Create your own dark tooth-eating fairy movie on your own, don’t ruin an already good story! Really, they had it all right there in the original story: demonic entities infesting the house, but only three of them. Just show the guy selling his soul for some power or something, but instead he summons these nasty little demons, and they want to trap souls, not eat teeth. (Then it would be like a Chick Publications religious propaganda comic book!) This is not really all that hard, guys! If you want a challenge, write something new! And if you can’t write something new, then don’t ruin something that’s already good. Ruin something that sucks: that way, nobody will notice you ruined it.
Hey, the original was cheap and quick, and it had lame monster costumes, but it was really great: the woman’s grandfather made some evil deal or something, and the house got infested with three little munchkin demons: no other explanations, and we didn’t need any, either. (I may even be inventing that evil deal part, I don’t know. {Yes: No evil deal; the grandparents just bought the house, unbricked the fireplace, and voilà: goblins!} The house might have just gotten infested with goblins with the first owners, and without a local supernatural exterminator, they were just screwed. {BTW: It just occurs to me now why there are three of the goblin/demon monsters in the original TV movie version: They make the person who releases them "one of them", so then there's the original one, which would work perfectly as a soul-stealing demon created by some Satanic pact gone wrong, there's the original home owner, and then there's Kim Darby's grandfather: that makes three.}) Plus, the musical score was great and creepy! (Billy Goldenberg was a master at this type of horror score!) But this one overdoes everything: it overdoes the story, and overdoes the monsters, and it’s just a bit tedious. Now, I’m glad they made the movie, but I was really hoping for a better movie. It’s acted fine, and the camera stuff looks good too, mostly, so it’s really a writing issue. There’s too much CGI, but it would probably make everyone else mad if there weren’t too much CGI these days, so I grudgingly accept that, although movies would be way better without too much CGI. (The Woman in Black didn’t have too much CGI, and maybe that’s why it’s a hit: who knows. It also didn’t ruin a great TV movie, so that may be why it’s a hit, too.) The problem is when remakes decide they want to make the source movie “better”: They usually just end up gumming up the works with their extra crap and ruining what could have been a great movie. Such is the case here. Oh well…
I was really expecting a lot more from Guillermo del Toro. But you know, his movies are all chock full o’ way too much CGI these days, so I guess I should have realized what to expect. If only he could get back to that spooky realism he got with The Devil’s Backbone. Now that’s one of the all time great ghost movies right there! The CGI is perfect, and everything is so believable, you cringe in the bullying sequences. I never feared for anyone in this remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, because the monsters were so phony, and the whole production screamed: “Designed for a movie!” But it was really the writing that ate the teeth out of this one. But maybe that’s somehow appropriate after all.
In the original, the main characters inherit this house from the woman’s grandmother. They don’t get much warning except not to mess with the fireplace in the basement by some old handyman who was also the handyman for the woman’s grandparents, so he knows something is wrong here, but he can’t just come out and tell them, because it’s so unbelievable (and also for another reason). And the house was built by some unknown guy in the 1800s. But in this new version, the family buys this house after it has been unoccupied since the guy who built it died over 100 years earlier. So how does this handyman know about the goblin monsters? It would have been far better to have had this house inherited from grandparents who bought it years before, and that it had a bricked up fireplace back then, too. That way the handyman knowing about the goblin monsters makes more sense, provided he’s old enough, and everything else flows better too. Then, everyone could find out about the house together, so Katie Holmes beating Guy Pearce to the library files doesn’t look so ridiculously improbable; and they could be working on the house, so things falling or moving around would be more expected, so it would make sense when the parents don’t believe Sally, and then they could have jettisoned the whole broken family plot point which is such an unnecessary distraction.
But the one change I really liked was having Sally be a little kid instead of a grown woman. That was an inspired choice. But the broken home stuff makes it too convenient that nobody believes her about the monsters. Less aloof parents would have made the story way more gripping, because little kids make stuff up all the time, and have imaginary friends, etc.: they don’t need to be from broken homes! That just gums up the works with extraneous fiddle faddle. (Applesauce?) Stick to the story and its shock-machine potential! Then we’ll never be bored, like I was for far too much of this movie.
I have watched a bunch of made for TV horror movies lately. You can find a lot of them on YouTube at the moment. They’re fun, but mostly, they’re disposable entertainment. They were simply intended to scare kids and keep them occupied so their parents could get a break. They were never intended to stand up to the kind of scrutiny people can give them now with DVD transfers, etc. They were made to be shown one time only, on a crappy early ‘70s television set, and that was it! So it’s sad when the TV movie is better than a new theatrical movie. That shouldn’t happen. And it didn’t have to happen, either. This original TV movie provided a minimal story background to serve as the basis for a pure shock machine. And this remake should have done the same thing. But maybe because they made Sally a little kid, they felt they couldn’t subject her to the same amount of horror throughout as Kim Darby had in the TV movie. And if you’re doing that in a theatrical horror movie, you should really rethink your victim choices. I like that they had a kid this time, but if they were going to pull their punches, they should have stuck with the wife and have them have no kids at all.
Also, with this kid being from a broken home, with uncaring parents and an unwanted step-mom, this makes her endangerment seem less gripping, since it looks like nobody would care that much if she were killed: see what I mean? It's far more horrifying if the family is a strong unit, and it's just a misunderstanding that makes the parents think she's kidding or imagining it about the goblins. Kids also go through phases, and it could be her acting out about moving away from her old friends at school, etc., so the parents think it's something else. And if the parents really care and love her, then when they find out the threat is real, they will be extra panicked and feel extremely guilty: this would have ratcheted up the tension immensely! And if they really love and care about this little girl, we do too; if she's an outcast loner without caring parents, we might feel there's an undercurrent there of this kid maybe having earned people's not caring about her somehow. And she already comes across as a moping little brat, so she's much less sympathetic than she should be for being our identification figure. So if they're going to switch the victim character to a little girl from the wife, then they should make sure it's going to work as well, if not better. And really, that should be the case with every change they make to a previously good story.
Also, with this kid being from a broken home, with uncaring parents and an unwanted step-mom, this makes her endangerment seem less gripping, since it looks like nobody would care that much if she were killed: see what I mean? It's far more horrifying if the family is a strong unit, and it's just a misunderstanding that makes the parents think she's kidding or imagining it about the goblins. Kids also go through phases, and it could be her acting out about moving away from her old friends at school, etc., so the parents think it's something else. And if the parents really care and love her, then when they find out the threat is real, they will be extra panicked and feel extremely guilty: this would have ratcheted up the tension immensely! And if they really love and care about this little girl, we do too; if she's an outcast loner without caring parents, we might feel there's an undercurrent there of this kid maybe having earned people's not caring about her somehow. And she already comes across as a moping little brat, so she's much less sympathetic than she should be for being our identification figure. So if they're going to switch the victim character to a little girl from the wife, then they should make sure it's going to work as well, if not better. And really, that should be the case with every change they make to a previously good story.
Recently there has been one movie that remade a great film and outdid the original, in my opinion. That original movie coincidentally also starred Kim Darby as the female lead. (What are the chances of that?) The movie I’m referring to is True Grit: It was great, but the new version is even better. But it didn’t get that way by changing large chunks of the plot or characters. They just really rethought the locations, and decided night scenes would work better than day scenes, etc. And I’m not big on Westerns, either (unless they’re Spaghetti Westerns from the ‘60s and ‘70s). But that was the Coen Brothers, so perhaps that sets the bar too high. But seriously, if you can’t make a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week better in a remake, then you’ve got a problem.
The thing I find most disappointing is that I was really looking forward to this movie, and I really wanted to like it! And it’s just a case of over-tinkering with the story that does it all in. (Well, that, and too much CGI.) Reworking a story is fine, but it really ought to make it better, not ruin it. But this could have been a great movie: one for the ages! Unfortunately, they screwed the pooch here, at least in my opinion. And that’s such a shame, because everything they needed for success had already been done for them. Oh, well.
Want to find out what happens to Sally…? Rent the movie. But you still won’t save her… (Mwa Ha Ha!) Actually, I’m joking: Katie Holmes gets abducted by the little guys: just like in real life! (I heard Tom Cruise is short.) Oh, sorry: spoilers. But really, I mean it when I say you should really see this movie if it sounds at all interesting to you. Always support movies you might like, or else you might not get others in the future! (These guys deserve credit for making it in the first place!) And if you haven’t seen the original made-for-TV movie, you might love this! And even for all its problems, it's way better than a lot of other movies out there, and I'd choose it over 95% of everything else these days in a New York minute! So while I can't help being disappointed in it, it's not all bad. And if I wasn't really interested, I wouldn't have written anything about it. (And this is the longest post on this whole blog!) My college art professor said once to his best student, after he finished eviscerating her work, and she complained about the harsh criticism: "If I didn't think it had real potential, and if the intent weren't excellent, I wouldn't have said anything, because I don't waste my time on things that don't deserve it." Such is the case with this movie and me: I expect so much from it because it's exactly what interests me. They didn't nail it, but then again, I'm pretty exacting about my favorite things, so there you are. But you might love it, and I might be wrong about everything I've said, too. I don't think so, but you might: who knows.
BTW: There is one way in which this movie could be very satisfying: If you are a step-mother or a step-father to an ungrateful brat who is a jerk to you no matter what you do, then this movie could be very cathartic for you. Just don’t tell anyone that’s why you’re watching it, or else they’ll think you’re a child-abuser. But the ending reveals that the step-parent always loses in the end, so you’ll be resigned to your fate. Maybe that’s the “moral” of this movie: Don’t marry into a broken home, or else all your clothes will be cut to ribbons, you’ll be rejected and dumped on by your step-children, and you’ll just be eaten by goblins in the end, so run, run, run away before that wedding day!
