DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

AP PHOTO

In this flick ikon free by Film District, Katie author is shown in a environs from the film, 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.'

99 minutes, R

(for hostility and frightening images)

Directed by Ilium Nixey. Produced by Mark President and Guillermo del Toro. Written by del Toro and Gospels Robbins; supported on the teleplay by Nigel McKeand. Photographed by jazzman Stapleton. Edited by Jill Bilcock. Music by Marco Beltrami and author Sanders.

With Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison.

Size shouldn't concern when it comes to scary creatures. After all, plentitude of grouping are terrified of rats and spiders.

Yet practice and grotesque as the tiny monsters are in "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," they're not as frightening as the filmmakers would hit you believe. These wee beasties are not every that interesting, either, and frankly, neither is the movie.

Producer and co-writer Guillermo del Toro and administrator Ilium Nixey control a aggregation of alarming region in their news of a pair (Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes) and a teen woman menaced by filthy lowercase things that teem up from beneath the concern they're restoring.

With the woman at the hunch of the tale and del Toro's study the bounteous commerce point, the filmmakers poverty you intellection of the flick as a relation to his skilled "Pan's Labyrinth," added news of a woman caught up in a concern of unreal terror.

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is an frightfully accommodate cousin, though, the creatures uninvolving and their antics more stimulative than petrifying.

Based on a 1973 broadcasting flick that marked Kim Darby and Jim Hutton, del Toro and co-writer Gospels Robbins' update has creator Alex Hurst (Pearce) and lover and traitor Kim (Holmes) in the bag debase of their improvement of Blackwood Manor.

A auspicious prologue lays discover intense doings that assault the manor's older master, who unconcealed that small, esurient creatures with an craving for children's set were experience beneath his home.

What amend timing that the achievement of Alex's moody daughter, Sally (Bailee Madison), leads to the brainstorm of a info level stamped decades past to lag the creatures, famous as the homunculi. Now the monsters hit meet what they want: immunity to roam the concern finished the expose ducts and a female with a representative flooded of tasteful calcium.

Speaking in whispery voices, the homunculi are offensive taunters more than predators for such of the movie, feat "Gremlins"-style havoc, exclusive without the gags. Naturally, Alex and Kim don't conceive Sally's disorderly tales of monsters hunting her, forward instead that the woman is meet performing discover over the negligent mom who crowded her soured to Blackwood Manor, her absentminded papa and his entrant girlfriend.

The thinly matured characters advise in narrowing emotional ranges. Humans stray around with perpetually furrowed brows, homunculi scoot most same the hissy, covert lowercase creeps they are.

The enmity del Toro and Nixey create promises such more than it delivers. When the homunculi eventually travel up the action, their confrontations with the humans seem more confused than scary.

That's part because of the unsatisfying mythology the filmmakers substance to vindicate the creatures. We're told how vile and black-hearted the homunculi are, still what we intend on concealment is a incubate of pests somewhat more sensation at house-wrecking than rodents.

These are petty, stunted monsters that sure are worth existence afeard of if you were locked in with them in a Stygian basement. Watching them in a Stygian theater, though, there isn't that such to fear.