I love MTI, I really do—they try harder than pretty much anyone in the business.  It’s really only too bad that when they try, they just can’t get a lot of results.

Every time I pick up a new MTI title  (and I stick with them because I always hope they’ll manage to pull off improvement) , like today’s little pick, Dark Secrets, (which will be available for you folks to pick up April 7th) I’m always a little impressed and I get me a nice shot of hope injected like adrenaline directly into my heart.  Yeah, just like in Pulp Fiction.  But anyway…like I said—I take a look at that creepy box art and that well put together back of the box description and I usually end up thinking, wow, this could REALLY be awesome.

Sadly, the actual movie never seems to live up to the incredible promise that MTI puts out.  And I’ll sum up why.

In Dark Secrets, there’s trouble afoot for celebrity A-listers Darryl and Lori Van Dyke, whose daughter has just recently disappeared under what can really only be called mysterious circumstances.  Two detectives are put on the very high-profile case, but neither can shake the feeling that they’ve seen this somewhere before.  In fact, the kidnapping of the Van Dykes’ daughter looks oddly like the work of a serial kidnapper who has struck twice before, but with noticeable differences.   With no clues, no ransom note and no motive, the detectives race against time to find the kidnapper and his victims before it’s too late.

The order of the day, as far as Dark Secrets goes, is “damn with faint praise”.  Because, you see, what they’ve put together here is a thoroughly goony little suspense thriller title with the possibility of ghosts involved, though not really.  See, you’re never really sure if the detectives chasing after the abducted little girl are seeing ghosts, seeing the real little girl, or just having liver cirrhosis flashbacks (apparently one of the detectives favored a little of the hooch unless I totally misread a mocking journalist).  I also love that a DVD bootlegger managed to show up in the proceedings, because you don’t see terribly many people trying to sell theatrical releases on DVD when they’ve taped them themselves.  One “customer” actually says “someone’s head’s in the way!”, to which the bootlegger responds, “that’s a special feature”.

No.  No, it’s not.  Silly bootlegger.

And they’re trying desperately to build suspense here, but it really comes off as more boring than anything else.  And that’s really rather sad, because the concept could’ve sustained a whole lot more scares than this tepid little presentation actually managed to pull off.

Tepid really is an excellent word for it—it tries very hard to generate scares but it can’t seem to get them quite right.  It’s not that Dark Secrets isn’t good…it’s just that Dark Secrets isn’t VERY good.  The playback seems washed out, almost grainy, and I don’t think it’s intentional.  The sound quality is almost stock audio, the kind of plinky melodramatic background music you’ve heard dozens of times before.  Everything about Dark Secrets just screams “you’ve seen this one already”, and frankly, I’m not too happy about the return visit.  It almost mocks me, with its cries of “you can’t go home again”, because I remember this particular location being a lot darker and scarier, and not near as shabby and threadbare.  I’m not scared of ghosts here—I’m more scared of getting MUGGED than anything.

And that’s sad.  Dark Secrets had a great idea that could’ve been a real winner and instead just let it fall into entropy and disuse.  It’s like watching a great old building crumble because no one’s been in it for fifty years or so—it’s a tragedy that could have been avoided.  And frankly, maybe Dark Secrets should be avoided too.