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Afraid of the Dark [1991] This starts out like a Film on 4 slasher movie, with a young boy [Ben Keyworth] creeping around in the background like a junior Hitchcock voyeur, peeping through windows and from behind railings at a group of people in a curiously depopulated London, caught somewhere between the '90s and an Edgar Wallace-ish '50s of sinister stalkers and blind victims. A mad razor-wielder is attacking the patrons of a drop-in clinic for the blind, and the hero's mother [Fanny Ardant] seems to be in line for victimisation, as does her pretty friend [Clare Holman], while all the window-cleaners, locksmiths and photographers in the area are twitchily perverse and ominous suspects, and the fatherly police inspector [James Fox] actually is the kid's Dad. However, about half-way through, this combination of Emil and the Detectives and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage pulls an arty about-face, climaxing with a tastelessly gory torture-and-stabbing-and-knitting-needle-eye-gouging, and then breaking the story down to its constituent elements, recasting all the actors and turning the child from potential hero to perhaps psychotic villain. Afraid of the Dark is actually afraid of its own genre, feeling it can only deploy the mechanics of suspense and eeriness if it wraps itself up inside onion-layers of distancing effects, winding up as annoying rather than intriguing. For all its faults, at least Dead Again knew how to
be a rubbishy thriller of the old school; this cautious, trembling,
oh-so-perfectly acted-and-designed-and-directed picture is one long,
icy, empty cop-out. First Published In: The Good Times [issue unknown] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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