After Dark Originals: Dark Circles
Starring Johnathon Schaech, Pell James, Andrea Frankle, Jenn Foreman
Directed by Paul Soter
New parents Alex (Johnathon Schaech) and Penny (Pell James) decide to move out of the big city and into a house in the suburbs so they could keep their child better protected. As soon as they move in, though, things start going wrong. They both start seeing a mysterious woman, there is heavy construction next door that keeps them awake during the day, and their baby suffers from a disease where it confuses day and night, so it spends all night crying, keeping them up at night.
As the days of sleeplessness catches up with them, they both seemingly hallucinate the woman in their house, and begins to act carelessly with the baby, almost injuring him on multiple occasions. Is this mysterious woman real? A ghost? Or a figment of their sleep-deprived brains?
The concept was an interesting one, and something I'm sure every new parents face. Personally I would never have children so I wouldn't have to deal with that, but I remember my college years staying up for days at a time, and it got so bad I would hallucinate and see things that weren't there, so there is that aspect of the film. It was a nice change of pace to decide whether or not things were really happening or not.
Directed by one of the original Broken Lizard members (the same people who produced such comedies as "Beerfest" and "Super Troopers," one would expect this to be a comedy, and in a sense it was. It was so arguably bad it was funny. Scenes repeated one another, we get act after act of the couple yelling at each other, throwing in some cheap scares (although the scare in the first scene was actually genuinely good, unfortunately it raised the bar that the rest of the film couldn't reach).
The acting wasn't bad, but it gave us two very unlikeable characters that I found more annoying than anything, people I could care less about. The best actor was the baby, who looked so darn adorable. Other than that, this wasn't a film to write home about, filled with the typical cliches and not treading into any new territory.
My Rating: C
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