|
 |
|
Horror Movie Double Bill!
Cinema
Reviews - Uploaded July 8, 2003
Dark Water
*
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. Japan.
110 minutes. Directed by Hideo Nakata. Written by Hoshisho Nakamura, Koji
Suzuki; based on the novel by Suzuki. Starring Hitomi Kuroki, Rio Kanno,
Asami Mizukawa, Fumiyo Kohinata, Shigemitsu Ogi, Mirei Oguchi, Yu Tokui,
Isao Yatsu.
Wrong
Turn
*1/2
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA.
95 minutes. Directed by Rob Schmidt. Produced by Brian J. Gilbert, Robert
Kulzer, Stan Winston. Written by Alan McElroy. Starring Desmond Harrington,
Eliza Dushku, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto, Lindy Booth, Julian Richings,
Kevin Zegers, Garry Robbins, Ted Clark.
It's weird to see a movie go ahead with the courage
of its convictions and take an idea seriously when it really just has no
point. You sit there with your eyebrow raised all the way through, seeing
right through everything, wondering how the director ever thought he'd get
away with it. "Dark Water" is a horror movie that sits there
and drags and seems very full of itself, and is based on the premise that
puddles are scary. They're not.
I'm getting sick of all these 'atmospheric' horror
movies, made by young hotshots who think that they can easily play an audience
by memorising the old maxim that what you don't see is scarier than what
you do. Some of them are great; I'm a big fan of "The Blair Witch Project",
backlash or not. But movies like "The Eye" and "Dark Water" are something
else. They have thin and slow drama built around the scares in order to pad
out their running times, and we're supposed to sit there pretending like
we care about the sketchily drawn characters and feeling wowed with anticipation
because the mood is solemn and nothing much is happening.
Here, Hitomi Kuroki plays Yoshimi, a young divorcee
who moves into a spacious apartment block with her cute little daughter Ikuko
(Rio Kanno). Images are slightly overcast and footsteps make distinctive
sounds -- atmosphere, atmosphere! -- and quel surprise when creepy craziness
starts going bump in the middle of the night. There are rumblings from the
walls, and then leaks coming down from the ceiling, and more rumblings, and
more leaks, and the leaks make puddles, and the tap drips, and it's all so
ineffective that I didn't even need the toilet.
This is a movie made for people who will eat up
any horror film of visual invention, or for critics who fancy going on about
the restraint and the slow-building anxiety and all the rest of that crap.
I'm of the opinion that a horror movie had better respect its audience, and
give us some credit by recognising that we know we're watching a horror movie.
It's not interesting to wait an hour for characters to realise something
odd is going on, standing in empty corridors looking all shock-eyed into
the distance. Along with a lot of the mother looking terrified and the daughter
keeping wandering into danger, "Dark Water" gives us a couple of easy clues
as to where it's leading, and goes there without any complication -- basically,
it's "The Ring" without the video, or, in other words, "The Ring" without
anything interesting.
"Dark Water" is from the same director, Hideo
Nakata, and based on a novel by the same author, Koji Suzuki. I don't know
what their obsession is with little girls trapped in water towers, or why
they think that we won't get impatient as their simple stories unfold in
scenes of ponderous silence, but it's time for them to move on.
The other new shock flick this week is
"Wrong Turn", and once you've seen the trailer, you pretty
much know the whole score. A bunch of young people find themselves stranded
in the Louisiana backwoods without access to phones, and end up being besieged
by freaky-ass hillbilly mutants with long hair and ghoulishly decomposed
skin. Somebody makes a reference to "Deliverance" early on, but the set-ups
are like a more polished version of "Friday the 13th" and the plotting is
more or less a rip-off of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".
Rob Schmidt's film has been getting some okay
reviews, but it doesn't deserve them. Unlike some of the more awful
stalker-killer films from recent years (yes, "I Know What You Did Last Summer",
I mean you), it doesn't have morons shrieking around and speaking airhead
garbage in slacker voices, or big violin chords and quick cuts accompanying
every easy scare tactic. It's a bit more low-key, with some gravitas about
it, and the cast is led by the respectably grounded Desmond Harrington, as
well as Eliza Dushku, who doesn't get to show off her usual smarts or feistiness,
but is nonetheless pleasant to look at. "Wrong Turn" isn't a repellently
bad movie, it just doesn't bring anything new to the party, and I got the
feeling that a whole lot of talented people had gone and wasted their time
on a project too bland to be worth it.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
2003 Reviews
(alphabetical)
2003 Reviews (by star
rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews
(alphabetical)
Review Archive
Index
UK
Critic main page
|
|
![[Image]](http://www.ukcritic.com/posbanr2.gif)