I grew up on horror anthologies. Be it a book of horror short stories, or be it TV series like The Twilight Zone—I loved, and still love, good horror anthologies. When I heard about Fear(s) of the Dark, I'm not going to lie, I wasn't very intrigued. Mainly because horror anthologies, lately, have been totally worthless. Where originality and truly weirdly captivating ideas used to be, now horror anthologies are just filled with genre clichés. But I gave Fear(s) of the Dark a try anyway. As negative as I am about the entertainment industry, I still have a blind faith that someone, anyone other than myself and a select few of my favorite authors/directors, can come up with an original and captivating story. And I had my faith crushed.
Fear(s) of the Dark starts out fine. Not great, but fine. The first segment, which entails a semi-unique story of a man and his bug problems, isn't amazing by any means, but it's by far the best you get from Fear(s) of the Dark. After that decent segment, there is absolutely nothing else worth watching. The other five stories are all either painfully clichéd, or they're done in such a way that they're so utterly boring, they're nearly impossible to watch. Some of them, such as the one about the alligator, are just pointless. They're equivalent of someone verbally telling you the plot outline of a Dora the Explorer episode: yes, technically, they're defined as a story, but in reality they're not. There's no significance.
Speaking of Dora the Explorer, another major problem with this anthology is the unabashed lack of maturity. Just like in every cliché horror movie, there's severed heads and boobs in Fear(s) of the Dark, but there is NOTHING mature about the stories behind the "mature" images. Everything about the stories are simplistic and juvenile. It's become a pop fad with generic "dark" fantasy authors/directors like Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro to take a child's fairy tale and reimaging them for grown-ups. But what these writers—and I am in no way limiting this statement to the two I mentioned above—fail to realize is, adding violence and some heavy themes done not make a child's story mature. The best example of this is the new film Watchmen, which reminded me of an episode of The Wiggles with a few spurts of generic blood-spray. I honestly felt like I was watching a little kid's movie. Heavy themes and "graphic" images don't make something mature. What makes something mature is the nature in which the story is told. If you were to cut someone's arm off in real life, the nature is brutal and sick. If you cut someone's arm off in a movie, the nature is generally taken as fun PG-13 gore. The motives are what makes something mature. And fantasy writers don't understand that. The writers of Fear(s) of the Dark understand it even less. And it shows.
The art is pretty decent, I guess. I didn't see anything too amazing about it, but it certainly wasn't bad. It's no better or worse than you'd see in your average graphic novel. I'm sure these artists could do better, but I'm not going to complain about it. What I am going to complain about, though, is the subtitles. The version I got had yellow subtitles, and I could read every word fine, but there's the problem: reading takes away from the movie A LOT. I love a lot of foreign films, so using subtitles is my second nature, and I've never once complained about subtitles in any of the foreign films I've seen. But with Fear(s) of the Dark, the movie forces you to be reading when you should be concentrating on the artwork. At least five times, I had to rewind and re-watch a scene because I was reading the subtitles and a major plot point happened on screen, and I missed it totally. This becomes very annoying very fast. A few times, I thought I might as well just turn the movie off because the effort it took to concentrate on the art and on the subtitles at the same time was not nearly worth the payoff. Another problem with the execution of the film is the pathetic starving-artist monologues between each segment. Well, let me take that back: Another problem with the execution of the film is the pathetic execution in general, highlighted by the pathetic starving-artist monologues between each segment.
And finally, we get to the blatant lack of entertainment value. This is by far THE least interesting animated film I have ever watched in my life. I fell asleep and had to rewind nearly ten times. It came to the point where I literally had to stand up and walk around just to stay awake for the ending of the film. There is no excuse for a movie, any movie, to be this utterly boring. The reasons it's boring is because, (1), the lack of originality, thus the lack of captivation, and, (2), because the artists focus so much on their average artwork, that the storytelling is oftentimes put on second burner, or just forgotten about completely.
I could be frilly and come up with a creative way to end this review, but I'm not going to. I'm going to put as much effort in this concussion as the artists put into this film: Fear(s) of the Dark is bad. Don't watch it.
(Do I sound like a kindergartener when I put my final opinion in that shallow of a statement? So do the artists when they put their art in this shallow of a movie.) 2/10
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