I'm a sucker for ghost movies, particularly those involving spirits of the emaciated, dark-black-haired, Asian female variety. I'm the guy who took his TV out of his room for a week after seeing The Ring in high school (16 isn't really that young, is it?). What's more surprising is that the never-ending supply of toned down Japanese-horror remakes continue to give me the tinglies. The Grudge scared me. Dark Water scared me. Even The Grudge 2 kind of freaked me out. Yes, I'm that lame.
So when a movie involving the required elements (again, skinny Asian girls plastered in off-white makeup) fails to frighten me, wimp amongst ghost wimps, you know it's a fairly staggering failure. Judging from the unshaken condition of my clearly fragile psyche, the latest J-horror rehash, Shutter, is that failure.
I'll give you the plot rundown, though there's really little need. Suffice to say, there's an American couple in Japan (played here by Joshua Jackson of Dawson's Creek and Rachael Taylor of Transformers). After a fateful incident the couple starts seeing spooky anomalies cropping up in photos. Those anomalies lead to an emaciated, dark-black-haired Asian female ghost popping up in all sorts of unexpected places to raise all sorts of havoc. If this sounds familiar, it's because it is the plot of 99 percent of J-horror remakes that have come out over the past few years.
The redundancy isn't what bothers me, though. At this point, I appreciate most of J-horror as much as I appreciate slasher flicks. Sure Jason, Michael Myers and Freddy do the same thing every time, but as long as their rampages hit the genre marks with a certain efficacy (by which I mean there's lots of gore) the ritual can be amusing enough to warrant a watch.
With J-horror, what you're looking for are jumpy scares. You're waiting for that darned ghost girl to come suddenly and disjointedly crawling out of a dark corner or electronic device. If slashers run off the banal thrill of steady violence, J-horror runs off the dread that a nightmarish vision can and will come from anywhere.
Then there's Shutter, a film in which the only thing I dreaded was the running time breaking 90 minutes (it graciously clocks in at 85). Shutter roundly fails to satisfy the (very lenient) benchmarks of its genre. The ghostly effects are ham-fisted, even by horror standards. The soundtrack is over-the-top to the point of unintentional satire. Most grievously, the shock scares are telegraphed. Granted it's hard to be all that original after six years of The Ring rehashes, but there's so little effort put into the "Boo!" moments of Shutter that it's inexcusable.
Storytelling and character development don't help pick up the slack. J-horror characters usually aren't terribly deep. If slasher teens are all sex and rock and roll, J-horror couples are all human disconnection. Though the latter motif may sound substantial, in practice it is generally just mundane relationship problems. Here, we find weakly fleshed-out relationship problems compounded by a lack of chemistry between the lead actors. The story may not be terrible, but without the scares to ride on you're only left with the melodrama.
It's a special kind of failure when you ask so little of a movie and it still fails to deliver. Perhaps the 2004 version of Shutter, from which the latest was adapted, had something to offer. Frankly, though, it could be five times as scary and still would not be worth seeing. So, if you're really curious about the quality of Shutter, all you need do is this -- switch the title's "u" with an "i." 3
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
