Beneath the Darkness: The first "B" of the year

By Horacio Garcia

The long an honorable pantheon of American B horror movies has a new addition with Beneath the Darkness, a hybrid of high school and serial killer flick, directed by Martin Guigui and co-produced by Guillermo Del Toro. Similarly to Tarantino, Del Toro likes to involve himself in this kind of low budget adventure and with the same variable results.

This time he teamed up with Guigui, a guy who's been around for a while directing comedies for National Lampoon and obviously, the weight of the producer was enough to enroll Dennis Quaid in the project. Quaid, a Emmy Award winner, seems to be going through that phase in the life of some movie actors (specially ex action stars) in which they still refuse to go into television and you'll see them take these minor projects here and there until they realize that TV is the right place for people their age (Kiefer Sutherland’s last movies before going to do 24 come to mind).

The story of Beneath the Darkness begins two years before the main events, when Ely, the mortician of a small Texas town, forces his wife's lover to dig his own grave and then buries him alive. A couple years later a group of nosey local teenagers catches a glimpse of Ely dancing with his wife's corpse and they realize that something is terribly wrong with the man.

The leader of the group, Travis (Tony Holler) is a lonely guy who recently lost his sister and relays for affection in his friends Abby (Aimee Teegarden), Brian (Stephen Lunsford) and dorky Danny (Devon Werkheiser). The thrills in the movie begin when the group breaks into Ely's house and one of them ends up dead. The rest of the movie follows the efforts by the surviving teen to tell the authorities that the respected mortician and former local football hero is a deranged monster.

Beneath the Darkness exploits so many Hollywood clichés that if they didn't made it intentionally as a spoof of southern gothic horror flicks they should be considering that as a marketing choice.  Fortunately for the director, Dennis Quaid got it from the beginning of the film and his scenes, including a scary final parliament, are pretty tongue-in-cheek most of the time. The rest of the cast, made out of young TV actors is uniformly decent but takes way too seriously a job that should've being more fun. Aimee Teegarden, the pretty girl from Friday Night Lights, is probably the best of the bunch simply because she is a pretty blond playing a pretty blond.

The low budget in Beneath the Darkness is noticeable in some details, especially a hurried edition that cuts some of the best scenes, but carries on proudly taking advantage of every possible freebie Smithville,Texas had to offer, including the local marching band. Anyway, with all that mashing of genres and clichés I have the hunch that this one is going to become one of those video cult classics.

Tags Aimee Teegarden, Beneath the Darkness, blogger: Horacio Garcia, Dennis Quaid, Guillermo del Toro, Tony Holler