Movie Review: Beneath the Darkness (2011)

Synopsis: After a unit on Macbeth leads to a discussion about ghosts, a group of four high school friends stakeout the house of local mortician Vaughn Ely to prove or disprove rumors of the home being haunted. Believing the house to be empty but seeing the silhouette of a dancing couple in the window, they investigate further, only to discover Ely is home and he is dancing with the body of his deceased wife. An angry Ely kills one of the friends as they flee his house, but the local authorities don't believe the survivors' story, forcing two of them, Abby and Travis, to try to find proof even though it puts their lives in danger.

Who's in it? The movie stars Dennis Quaid, Aimee Teegarden, Tony Oller, Stephen Ford and Brett Cullen.

Review: I added Beneath the Darkness to my movie library a couple days ago because it sounded like it would be a somewhat creepy film. My wife and I ended up watching it last night and it turned out not to be quite as good as I had hoped.

I'll start out by saying I thought the character of Dr. Vaughn Ely (Quaid) was intriguing and a solid horror movie villain. He was exactly what you want to see in a movie like this, violent and insane but also able to turn it off and charm people to the point nobody would suspect him.

I also liked how the movie had him stay one step ahead of Travis (Oller) and Abby (Teegarden) throughout. There were times when he seemed to be able to predict their next move, which made their attempts to prove their story about him all that much more dangerous.

The problem with the movie is it lacked the element of surprise. There's no big mystery or last-second twist in the film. We know right off the bat he has his wife's corpse in the house, and it didn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out who was really buried in her grave. Even the main plot was kind of predictable. The second Travis and Abby found a coffin in the backyard, for example, it wasn't difficult to figure out one of them would end up in it.

This is also another one of those movies that relies heavily on an inept police force for the plot to progress. I get Ely was a pillar of the community and had friends in the police department but the tarp in his backyard was clearly hiding something and I personally wouldn't completely dismiss a story about a teen being held hostage until I personally spoke to that teen. Plus, Ely stomped on a teenager's neck to kill him. It kind of feels like a competent medical examiner would see the difference between that and someone simply falling down a set of stairs.

Final Opinion: I think the movie would have been better had the part about the dead wife been kept a secret for much longer and the film left some doubts about Ely's guilt. It's an OK film thanks to Quaid's performance but not as good as it had the potential to be.

My Grade: C+

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