This remake of the 1973 cheesy, but effective made-for-TV movie is a bummer overall. I wanted to like this because Guillermo del Toro produced it. He keeps working on projects that interest me. Everything he has a hand in looks great, but none of his movies have ever really blown me away. "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" continues that trend.

The scenery looks great. The house, the surrounding grounds, shadows, cobwebs...everything looks incredible. The little CGI-beasties, however, do not. They are not scary because we see too much of them and it all feels a bit like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". They don't really ever mix into the live action. They reminded me of the little under-grounders from the old '80s horror movie called "The Gate" In that movie, the demons came up from down below only a couple of times. They were stop-motion animated and looked a lot like the ones in this movie but the filmmakers managed to keep them creepy. In this remake, that isn't the case.

The story is changed up a good bit from the original. The back story about the little demons is interesting on the surface but it is never truly explored, which means that it is really unnecessary. The writers would have been better off leaving their background unknown.

The biggest downfall is the stupid things the characters do or don't do. If the little creatures are sensitive to light, then leave the lights on. If bad things keep happening to your child when your not around, don't leave the kid alone in a room two floors away from you. If your kid starts finding teeth and very old silver coins lying around, don't just shove them in your pocket and tell her to go to bed. Take a look around. Try to figure out where she is getting all of the stuff. If one of the handymen comes up from the basement with razor gashes and stab wounds from scissors, don't consider it an accident. Even the police say it's an accident. The idiotic decisions abound.

I do like the ending which is a twist, but there isn't enough revealed in the story for it to make much sense.