Dark Corners

Dark Corners is yet another tedious, egregiously confusing horror flick that seems to be aiming for a David Lynchian sort of tone but instead winds up an entirely interminable piece of work. The story, which has something to do with two women (both played by Thora Birch) who are plagued by nightmares, doesn’t at any point make a lick of sense and one consequently can’t shake the notion that writer/director Ray Gower is making all of this stuff up as the movie progresses (the infuriatingly nonsensical conclusion only cements this feeling). Gower’s reliance on heavily-stylized visuals, coupled with his penchant for writing unusually laughable bits of dialogue, quickly transforms Dark Corners into a headache-inducing ordeal, while the almost uniformly amateurish performances (even Birch, so good in Ghost World, seems woefully out of place here) lends the production a distinctly low-rent, straight-to-video sort of vibe. And while the emphasis on random acts of brutality is certainly appreciated (a shocking moment cribbed from The Exorcist III notwithstanding), Dark Corners is ultimately far too incoherent and downright silly to come off as anything more than a failed experiment.

1/2* out of ****