This is getting bad. Hollywood. Yeah, it's getting bad. Guess what? It's all your fault.

"Darkness Falls" topped the box office last week, edging out "Kangaroo Jack." The film made $12 million this weekend, despite stinking more than a cracked septic tank.

People do not realize if they stop shelling out money to see this junk, Hollywood will stop making it. Instead, the masses are spoon-fed successful poop like this (and every other insultingly bad horror film) while great films such as "Gangs of New York," "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and "Adaptation." are scraping to make money back. Sadly, it appears this is due to their originality, as opposed to the likes of "Darkness Falls."

What exists of a plot is moronic. The nineteenth-century ghost of a murdered woman, called the Tooth Fairy, kills kids on the day they lose their last teeth. Having been a burn victim, her only weakness is light.

As a teenager, Kyle (Chaney Kley) escaped the terror, which claimed his mother as a child. Now, 15 years later he's called back the town of Darkness Falls (yes, yes try to hold in the bile) to help his junior high sweetheart (Emma Caulfield) figure out what's wrong with her little brother, Michael (Lee Cormie as the token creepy child). Michael won't sleep or go anywhere in the dark because he's afraid "she" will get him.

Scariness and mass murder ensue.

Sounds bad, doesn't it? It's worse than it sounds.

With a relatively inexperienced director and a cast of relative unknown and unskilled actors, it's no surprise this film draws more unintended laughs than it does scares.

The film opens with a storybook-style telling of the Tooth Fairy's backstory, relying on old photos for visual rather than inserting a flashback. Apparently by laying the whole backstory within the first two minutes, the writers (it took three of them to produce this mess) have an excuse to do whatever they want with their so-called characters. None of the characters are likable. They are all rigid, delivering dialogue such as "All this for a tooth" without a hint of skill or irony.

Back in the day, people were shot for movies like this.

Somewhere in the muddle of ideas, the central villain changes between a phantasm, a demon, a witch and an extremely bad special effect. The film depends too much on the Tooth Fairy as a figure of terror.

Donning flowing robes and a porcelain mask, the creature does little to instill terror (I can just see some guy taking a huge bong rip and saying, "Dude, we should make a movie about my mom's old mask!"). It looks like the rest of the film - fake and tired.

Calling the Tooth Fairy a villain might be a stretch though. The creature's primary objective is to kill the main characters. Why not just let it go to town and do us all a favor? The less of them on the screen the better.

The only thing keeping this mindless drivel from going straight to the video shelf is the success of the films it rips off. The Tooth Fairy's only weakness is light,