LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - For an actor, some roles are a challenge, some are Oscar bait, some have personal meaning, and a few are mostly usually a paycheck.
One can usually assume a purpose of a demented mortician in this muted teen fear film falls into a latter difficulty for star
Dennis Quaid
. Or maybe a captivate was simply that "Beneath a Darkness" was shot within spitting stretch of Austin, that he calls home these days.Ely Vaughn, Quaid's loopy undertaker -- he dances nightly with a embalmed remains of his passed mother -- is a vital adult impression in "Beneath a Darkness." A former star high-school athlete, he is a post of a village in his tiny Texas town.
"Beneath," however, lets viewers know right from a get-go that Ely is both bonkers and a murderer. In a film's opening scene, a recently widowed Ely pulls a gun on a neighbor out walking his dog, army a man to puncture his possess grave and afterwards buries him alive.
Flash brazen to dual years after when a movie's teen favourite (
Tony Oller
) and several pals spin into high-school Sherlocks and start questioning rumors that a mortician's residence is haunted. After Ely murders one of them in front of Oller, a teen and his partner (Aimee Teegarden
, a prolonged approach artistically, if not geographically, from her purpose on TV's "Friday Night Lights") try to display Ely -- of course, a adults all mistrust their story -- before he can do divided with them, too.None of this, as destined by Martin Guigui ("Cattle Call") and created by a late
Bruce Wilkinson
(a Texas attorney, this was his initial script), is generally scary, suspenseful or bloody. References to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Shakepeare's "Macbeth" -- both about a erosive effects of shame -- seem like clumsy attempts to inject deepness where there is none.Given that a teen characters, both as created and performed, destroy to register as quite particular or witty, you'd have to be in their age organisation to indeed caring about their outcome.
Quaid, an actor able of judicious performances ("Wyatt Earp" and "Far From Heaven"), during slightest shows patience here, reigning in a psycho theatrics until a final scenes. He even manages to wring out a gloomy giggle or two, as when Ely drawls, usually before fatally stomping on a teen victim's neck after pulling a cursed child down a staircase, "Stairs can be really dangerous. Most accidents occur in a home."
Here's betting, though, that when some years from now a lights are lowered and a prominence tilt unspools during a career reverence to Quaid, there will be nary a stage from "Beneath a Darkness" popping adult on a screen.
(news.yahoo.com)
