Deep In The Darkness (2014) NR

A city doctor (Sean Patrick Thomas, Save the Last Dance) and his family move to a rural town to take over a practice and escape city life.  The town harbors a generations-old secret that they find difficult to escape.  With Dean Stockwell (Quantum Leap) in a small role.

While I would normally go into the plot in more depth at this point, and explain what I liked and didn't like about this film, instead I'm going to explain why I'm giving it a single star.  They started out with my most-hated trope of all time, the How We Got Here trope, or what I call "Fourteen hours earlier...".  It's lazy writing, and in this case was kind of a spoiler for the ending, which would have been better served not being shown ahead of time.  Following that, the only reason it's even getting a single star is because the buildup of paranoia, and creepy vibe, is very well done... up to a point.  Unfortunately someone decided that bloody, gory, sexual dream scenes needed to be inserted very abruptly and unnecessarily.  The film was sufficiently horrifying enough before those were dropped in, and they actually ruined the slow building effect they had going.

Then when I realized that the whole film is a textbook case of big-city people's fears of a small town, with their local customs and quirks, I just shut down.  We've seen it before, in everything from Torchwood's episode "Countrycide" [sic] to Deliverance and a myriad of treatments in between.  Sure, we get the opposite of the spectrum, like Northern Exposure or Gilmore Girls, with their love-affairs with small town living, but people really do love to drag out the horror stories about small towns and their presumed "cults".  It's insulting.

The isolates were creepy, but once we're shown them fully and in bright light, they lose a lot of their terror and become curiosities.  Really gross curiosities.

One laugh out loud moment, one holy crap moment at the very end, and about three eye roll moments before I stopped ticking those off.  There were a dozen different choices they could have made that would have let me continue to enjoy this story, but they were not made.  The acting was all top-notch and felt sincere, it was just the subject matter and editing I had a problem with.

Only watch this if you're in the mood to see a figurative train-wreck.