Gothika (2003)

               The more I see good actors giving bad performances in terrible films, the more sympathetic I get to how uncertain their chosen profession seems to be. So much of how they’re perceived and what they’re judged on is completely out of their control. Scripts get constantly rewritten, their makeup and wardrobes are a series of choices made by others, and they need to trust the directors and editors to make them look good in the final cut. The more I dig into the nuts and bolts of what on paper are completely acceptable films but which in practice are boring and nonsensical, the more a lot of trends become understandable. I never quite understood the way that actors, once they reach a certain level of success, suddenly start getting handed producer credits as part of signing on. I thought it was a way to grab a piece of the backend, and I’m sure that’s a lot of it, but I think it’s more important that they be put in an official position with some amount of authority over the decisions that go into the movie. I’m sure this is the reason why a lot of actors also like working with the same directors. I personally have never been impressed with anything Shawn Levy has stamped his name on, but apparently the way he works and the movies he turns out does something for Ryan Reynolds because the two have been inseparable for years now. Same with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Decaprio, Peter Wier and Mark Wahlberg, the list goes on. The fundamental nature of making movies is controlling chaos, and it makes sense to cut down on the variables if you can.

They never do justify the title.

              As movies gradually started working more and more elaborate special effects into their productions, the opportunities for an actor to come off as supremely silly have skyrocketed. Behind the scenes features on movies used to be fascinating glimpses into the ingenuity of a cast and crew. Before he used up whatever inspiration he’d been given, Robert Zemeckis had ‘making of’ documentaries for his films that were almost as fascinating as the movies themselves. Now it’s just footage of actors in front of green screens with some dots drawn on their faces intercut with a bunch of other people staring at computer monitors. I refer you to the viral clip of Ian McKellen having a small breakdown on the set of the first Hobbit film, lost inside an ocean of green. While doing research on these films I’ve run across a number of anecdotes about actors being very nervous that what they were shooting wouldn’t come across as scary. Naomi Watts spent most of the shoot for ‘The Rings’ convinced that she was going to be embarrassed by the movie not being scary at all, which just proves that when you’re inside the movie during production you really don’t have any way of knowing how the thing’s going to turn out.

              That being said, ‘Gothika’ was the fourth film from Dark Castle Entertainment. Anyone signing up for this movie knew full well what they were getting into. The three previous films had all turned a profit and maintained a certain level of professionalism so it wasn’t likely to be complete dreck, but this is hardly the kind of movie you sign on to hoping to win some kind of award. It’s true that this is the best of their films I’ve seen, but that is a very low bar to clear. It rises all the way up to mediocre and isn’t as obviously cut to shreds as the rest of them. Most of the movie makes sense enough, although there are a couple of subplots that I have some very serious questions about.

              We finally have a movie with a single credited screenwriter again, it’s been a while. This movie was written by Sebastian Gutierrez, who I’m a little familiar with as I’ve previously written about both versions of his 2007 Lucy Liu film ‘Rise: Blood Hunter.’ These days he’s more of a writer/director, but for a few years there he had to toil away in the schlock mines. He’s one of the people to blame for ‘Snakes on a Plane,’ among other things. His script here isn’t terrible. Direction is by Mathieu Kassowitz, who’d been acting and directing in France since the 90’s. The only other movie he did that people are likely to be aware of is 2008’s ‘Babylon A.D.’ His direction isn’t awful in this movie. He has a very mobile camera and a lot of his blocking and framing take advantage of his habit of longer takes to inform the audience with only the visuals. And for once I wasn’t assaulted by rapid-fire editing. He’s also decent at establishing geography and spatial relationships and understands basic planting and pay off. These are not advanced techniques I’m complimenting him about here, I actually made an excited little note while watching that he thought to get insert shots. This is my thirty-first ghost movie in a row and my standards have now sunk dangerously low.

              The cast is decent, but really this is a showcase for Halle Berry. The movie poster is just a shot of her in the rain and it gives an accurate impression of the movie as it spends most of its time with her. She plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a prison psychiatrist, and she’s fine here. Berry was still riding the career boost she got from appearing in the first ‘X-Men’ film and rapidly cashing in. She’d already done ‘Swordfish’ and ‘Die Another Day’ by this point, but the good times were about to hit a snag as her next movie would be ‘Catwoman.’ Another big name in the cast plays another prison shrink, Pete Graham. People like to say that Robert Downey Jr.’s career was saved by ‘Iron Man,’ when that was just one of a number of comeback vehicles. According to interviews Downey finally got sober starting in July of 2003, after which he appeared in ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,’ ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ and ‘Zodiac.' This movie was shot right near the tail end of his truly rough times. He’d been fired from “Ally McBeal” in April of 2001 after getting arrested for wandering the streets barefootwith cocaine in his system. He ended up nearly broke after an extended stay in rehab. After an assist from Mel Gibson, who covered his insurance for ‘The Singing Detective,’ he started to put his life back together. He met his future wife, Joel Silver’s assistant Susan Levin, on the set of ‘Gothika,’ and with her assistance achieved sobriety by the middle of 2003. Shame that he was shooting this movie in early 2003, so here he looks noticeably rough. Something weird’s going on with his character as well, which I’ll circle back to later.

              They’re not the only actors slumming in this thing. Penelope Cruz plays the one (1) patient we see Miranda interacting with before the spooky kicks in, Chloe Sava, and surprise surprise she turns out to be important to the plot. This was a couple of years after her US breakthrough in ‘Vanilla Sky.’ Miranda’s husband, Douglas, is played by Charles S. Dutton, who’s always going to be Roc to me. John Carroll Lynch, a prolific character actor who I know from “Carnivàle,” plays local sheriff Bob Ryan, who also happens to be Douglas’s best friend. This will be important later.

              The hook of the movie, such as it is, is that Miranda Grey is a prison psychiatrist who ends up locked in that exact same facility after she’s accused of brutally murdering her husband with an axe. It ends up being because of a ghost, and I have to admit that I didn’t see a couple of the twists in the movie coming. The opening establishes a few key details: Chloe is in prison for murdering her abusive stepdad, Miranda is considered super logical and level-headed by the rest of the staff, there’s some tension between her and Pete, and she seems to have a loving relationship with her husband, who also happens to be the head of the prison hospital. Late one night Miranda is driving home a different way than normal because an intense storm has washed away part of the road. Near a bridge she sees a girl standing in the middle of the road and swerves to avoid her. She gets out to see if she’s all right and right after she notices that the girl is wounded there’s some quick cut edits and she wakes up in the prison hospital three days later.

              A decent chunk of the movie is spent in the facility as Miranda pieces together what happened to her. They try to justify the fact that she’s in a facility she worked in being treated by a physician she’s close to with some tossed off lines that it’s only been three days, they’re the only facility nearby, she was catatonic for a day and a half and she’s just now getting lucid, blah blah. They’re supposedly waiting for a ruling from a judge, but the movie’s over before that ever comes back up. She’s kept in the nice facilities at first, but as she keeps escaping and acting up she’s eventually moved into the general population and even threatened with solitary. It’s not the worst justifications for plot necessities I’ve ever seen but I kept getting distracted by the fact that everything is close enough to plausible that they can kind of get away with it, but they have to crowbar justifications in every once in a while to maintain the illusion that it makes any sense.

Way too much of the movie is this.

              She soon learns that she’s accused of chopping her husband into pieces with an axe. At first she denies any involvement at all, but eventually moments of the night begin to filter back into her memory and she haltingly starts to admit that she was there, but she absolutely didn’t do it. Meanwhile she’s making friends with Chloe as they bond about how you can’t trust anybody who thinks you’re crazy. Eventually the ghost starts messing with part of the prison, allowing her to roam around the halls at night trying to escape. The first time she tries the ghost leads her to where Chloe is being held in solitary confinement, where she sees a man with a prominent tattoo in there with her. After she’s captured she yells at them about the rape, but nobody believes her, so when she escapes the second time she just steals a car and takes off. Through a decent set of breadcrumbs left by the ghost she ends up at her husband’s cabin in the woods, where she discovers a secret basement room containing a bed and a video camera. She watches a tape back and realizes that her loving husband has been making snuff films. The last victim is even still there, alive.

              The movie has a small amount of fun with the fact that everyone is now in a very awkward position. Her lawyer starts making demands now that it’s been revealed that the murder victim was a serial killer, and a visibly upset sheriff Ryan points out that she’s still under arrest for murder. By this point Miranda has realized that she did kill her husband, but only because she was possessed by the ghost of one of her husband’s victims, which is the girl she almost hit with her car way back at the beginning of the movie. She’s being held in a jail cell at the sheriff’s office instead of the prison, which makes it convenient when sheriff Ryan reveals that he was Douglas’s accomplice this whole time, as well as the man in the cell with Chloe. He and Miranda struggle, then through a series of stupid events the ghost manages to set him on fire. This allows Miranda to grab his gun and shoot him in the head. The ending scene is set a year later as Miranda and Chloe, both now free, commiserate with each other. Miranda sees a young boy standing in the middle of the street, but before she can warn him about the truck approaching it passes right through him, revealing that she’s now sensitive to ghosts. I’m not even going to get into how unlikely it is that two admitted if justifiable murderers are out free in less than a year.

              Most of the movie is just fine. The clues are set up properly and it plays fair with the information we’re given. I got a weird vibe from her husband from their dialogue at the beginning, and once he’d been murdered I knew there was going to be more to his story because you don’t cast Charles S. Dutton for three minutes of screen time. It’s also never a bad idea to distrust the sheriff in a horror movie. The problems in the script don’t come from the central story, it’s from all of the side stuff.

              At a certain point the movie makes some choices that seem to imply it’s going to examine the abusive practices of modern hospitals and mental facilities. Miranda is very familiar with the staff, having worked with them for years, but now that she’s an inmate none of them treat her like a person. Instead she’s just another crazy inmate. They start shoving her around a little bit and dropping grim little jokes at her expense. This is in about one and a half scenes and then it gets forgotten. I understand the inclusion of Chloe, the movie needed to establish some clues about another person being involved in the murders and it chose to do so by having that person repeatedly sexually assault her, but other than humanizing Miranda a little bit she doesn’t get much attention from the movie.

              Then there Downey as Pete and his entire inclusion in the movie. I have a theory based on nothing but my experience of watching the film, and that is that the character of Pete was originally a much smaller role that got given to Downey as a way to get some publicity for a part that wasn’t important to the plot at all. This made the part get expanded way past its natural size. It’s eventually revealed that Miranda and Pete have some feelings for each other, but that’s not how his character comes across in the beginning at all. I even started making notes referring to the character as incel Downey. He’s always just a little too close and talks to her for a little too long. I was sure he was going to be revealed as super creepy at some point, but what happens instead is that he’s just off to the side being Robert Downey Jr. for most of the film.

              The character itself completely makes sense as a minor and mostly unimportant character. He’s her friend before her incarceration and sympathetic doctor afterwards. He’s useful in that Miranda can summarize her current understanding of the spooky shenanigans going on to him every once in a while to make sure the audience is up to speed. By making this doctor her friend we can also dispense with any idea that she’s going to be very badly treated at the facility since he’s looking out for her. He doesn’t need to be involved in figuring out any of the ghost business as that’s not his role in the film, he’s supposed to be another minor obstacle for her to overcome before the end of the movie.

Probably not great.

              The problem comes in when you cast Downey for that unimportant role and his sheer celebrity distorts the entire movie around him. If that character got an amount of screen time commensurate with his importance to the plot he’d be sixth billed, easily. Instead he was listed in all of the advertising as the second lead, despite not serving that function in the movie. Except for the very, very end at no point does he believe in ghosts or profess to be interested in hearing about them. Every scene between Pete and Miranda is frustrating because this is a horror movie and his very reasonable diagnoses of her psychosis is always going to be wrong due to the actual ghosts we’ve already seen.

              Then there’s that scene at the very end. Previous to the climax, the last time we saw his character he was looking up images online of the kind of tattoo Miranda claims she saw on the chest of the man in the cell with Chloe. Then eight minutes later, after she’s had her confrontation with Ryan at the sheriff’s office and she’s panting from the adrenaline, Pete just shows up out of nowhere. He thumps against the locked glass doors and mouths through them to her, “I’m sorry, Miranda.” She nods at him, the movie fades out to the time skip to the last scene, and his name is never mentioned again.

              At no point does Pete perform any action helpful towards the resolution of the movie. He’s not even an unwitting antagonist getting in her way, she breaks out of her cell twice and the entire prison in just a few days, he’s not an obstacle at all. He’s prominent in scenes where his character would definitely be present but normally only in the background with maybe a few lines instead of front and center like he is. There’s also absolutely no reason for him to show up at the sheriff’s office at the end. He doesn’t assist in taking down the sheriff and Miranda has gotten herself out of any danger by the time he arrives. There’s no outstanding emotional issue between them and their interaction doesn’t resolve anything. The movie also never even pretends to establish a reason for why he suddenly shows up or how he knew she was in any danger at all. The last he knew she was just cooling her heels in a cell until her legal situation got sorted out. I am convinced that Downey, or more likely Joel Silver, leaned on the director to add more scenes for him since he was a Name, and of course this also meant that he had to be present at the thrilling climax no matter how little sense it made.

              I’m starting to get a sense of what different levels of budget functionally entail. In terms of big set pieces, this movie is fairly comparable to something like ‘Ghost Ship’ or ‘Thir13en Ghosts,’ but it’s all of the little things going on in the background that give the money or lack thereof away. When Miranda is driving home at the beginning, she runs into a police blockade stopping people from driving down the washed-out road. The movie could have gotten away with just one cop car flashing its lights in the middle of the road, but instead they had five or six with a whole gaggle of cops milling around. They could have come up with an excuse to keep Miranda isolated from the other prisoners (probably should have), but after she’s placed in the general population we have scenes in the full prison yard with tons of inmates milling around. There’s a second floor to Miranda’s home when they could have gotten away with only providing set dressing for one. When people wonder where the money is on screen, I’m beginning to wonder how much of it goes to nearly invisible details in the background making it seem as close to the cinematic version of real life as possible.

              For the final movie an entire marathon of ghost films I could have certainly chosen a worse one. On the other hand I could have bent some rules and maybe ended on something more interesting, like ‘Oculus,’ or more definitely terrible, like that remake of ‘The Fog.’ But I had so many problems finding genuine ghost movies early on that eventually I was just happy that the ones I picked started having for-real spookums in them. This movie turned a healthy profit but was absolutely savaged by critics at the time of release, and while I’d almost certainly agree with all of their criticisms, after some of the stuff I’ve seen lately I can’t be too mad about it. Berry is decent, Downey is distracting, and Cruz should have gotten more to work with. It’s certainly the least embarrassing Dark Castle film so far, but considering their next movie’s a remake of ‘House of Wax’ featuring Paris Hilton I’m not sad to be getting off this train at this stop.

Darkness Falls (2003)

               Movies are always worlds unto themselves. They operate by their own internal logic and set of rules that can swing wildly from mostly realistic to completely bananas. Even movies that are attempting to be grounded and realistic are inherently fictitious, and I don’t just mean the plot and characters. Nobody has to stand in line at the post office. Nobody has to visit three different restaurants before the wait time is acceptable. Nobody has an inconvenient burst of diarrhea during an important meeting. If anything like that does happen it’s inevitably going to become part of the plot or if it’s a comedy it’s going to end in a punchline. The gap between a straight drama like ‘Gods and Monsters’ and a fantasy adventure like ‘The Mummy’ is not all that wide, and not just because they both star Brendan Fraser.

              What straight dramas can get away with that more fantastical movies can’t is dropping audiences in the middle of the action without having an educational section where they bring everyone up to speed on the rules. Generally speaking, in these physics is going to operate the same as in the real world, the government structures and economies are going to be at least similar enough that it doesn’t have to be addressed, the basics are normal. Sometimes the plot’s going to be about assassinating the president or something, so maybe there needs to be either a scene or some visuals that clue in the audience that this one big thing is different but most everything else is the same. For fantasy and science fiction movies it can get tricky depending on how different everything is going to be. For something like ‘Star Wars,’ a film ostensibly without any connection to our reality, you have to kind of hand-hold the audience through the action until they get acclimated, maybe the spending the first third or so of your movie following around a naive hayseed who needs everything explained to him, thus giving everyone else an excuse to drop exposition to him and us.

              Horror isn’t any different. Whether it’s ‘Seven’ or ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ you have to let the audience know what threats characters will and won’t face. Brad Pitt doesn’t have to worry about Freddy showing up in his nightmares, and the kids in Springwood, Ohio don’t have to worry about John Doe running around town being all judgy. When the horror is supernatural in nature a certain amount of ambiguity is fine, even encouraged, but eventually we have to understand what the ghost or demon or monster or whatever can and can’t do. Quite often the plot of the movie is finding out that information and so the audience learns along with the characters. The only thing worse than not establishing any real rules is establishing rules and then breaking them.

              “Darkness Falls” is an example of a movie that fails along several different axes at once, but it’s such a piecemeal mess of a movie that it’s legitimately hard to know who’s ultimately at fault. The movie started life as a five-minute short film written and directed by Joe Harris called ‘The Tooth Fairy.’ It’s about a tooth fairy that gives money to good kids and death to bad kids. It’s even online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZ2TyaeHiI. This was acquired by Distant Corners Entertainment Group, a subdivision of Revolution Studios. Harris turned out a full script that was then rewritten by at least two other people, James Vanderbilt and John Fasano. Joe Harris has only had a couple of credits since, including co-writing something called ‘The Tripper,’ written and directed by David Arquette about a Reagan-obsessed serial killer. Sure. Vanderbilt has written on some … interesting movies in the years since this project, including ‘The Rundown,’ ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ 1 and 2, ‘White House Down,’ and fucking ‘Zodiac.’ Fasano is now a deep miner in the schlock mines, writing mainly tv movies like ‘Saving Jessica Lynch’ and ‘Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone.’ None of their work really inspires a whole lot of confidence, but the movie has been hacked to such shreds that it’s hard to assign any blame to the sections of the screenplay that survived.

              Directing was assigned to Jonathan Liebesman. This was his debut at the age of 26. He shortly afterwards directed ‘Rings,' the short that connected the first and second movies in that franchise. He got a bunch more attempts at becoming an established director, including the 2006 prequel ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning’ and a few tentpole features like the 2012 ‘Wrath of the Titans’ remake and the 2014 ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ The last few years he’s made the lateral move over to prestige tv, direction four episodes of the doomed ‘Halo’ show. The only part of his directing that I feel I can honestly criticize him for is his inability to shoot action coherently. Whenever there’s a physical confrontation or a chase scene the camera just waves around in the vague direction of what’s going on. It doesn’t even seem like it’s hand-held, it comes off like the Steadicam operator tripped on something and is desperately trying to maintain balance. The editing is shit too, but that’s mostly management’s fault.

              The cast is about as small as the budget. That’s not fair, the movie cost a completely reasonable $11 million and brought back in $47.5 million, so congrats all around for the success. There are really only three characters worth paying attention to, everyone else got their parts cut out from the movie. Our lead is named Caitlin Greene, played by Emma Caulfield Ford. The supposed lead is Kyle Walsh, played by Chaney Kley. In a normal movie Kyle would be the lead character, but so much of his backstory and characterization was cut out that he’s at best a co-lead. Caulfield Ford was still appearing in “Buffy: the Vampire Slayer” at the time of filming. Kley, who looks so much like James Roday Rodriguez in this movie it was incredibly distracting, only had a couple of small roles before landing the lead here. Caitlin’s much younger brother Michael is played by Lee Cormie, who appeared in a lot of Australian tv after he grew up a little more. Fun trivia fact: young Caitlin is played by Emily Browning, the little ghost girl from ‘Ghost Ship.’ She was having a nice little career at the turn of the millennium.

              So let’s talk about the length of the movie. On paper it’s eighty-four minutes and change, but that includes a full ten minutes and forty-three seconds of closing credits. Considering there’s a little ghost story at the beginning establishing the backstory of the monster of the film that’s just under three minutes long by itself, the movie proper is only seventy-two and a half minutes. I’ve mentioned in previous entries that obvious cuts are often made by studios to keep runtimes in the neighborhood of an hour and a half, everything by Dark Castle Entertainment has that ragged quality to them that means a company editor tore through them after the directors turned in their versions. This movie has multiple key sections chopped out to the point where they had to artificially extend the runtime with a very slow set of credits. To quote from the wiki: “After completion, the producers heavily truncated the final cut removing character backstory as well as expanded details on the Darkness Falls curse.” Keep this in mind as I race through the plot.

              As you’d expect from something expanded from a short called ‘The Tooth Fairy,’ the evil monster of the movie is called The Tooth Fairy. They could have gone a few different ways with this. You could make it some kind of fey creature that’s been asleep since the Middle Ages who has a very different idea of childhood traditions. You could do what Terry Pratchett did and have someone research or catch the real Tooth Fairy to gain access to its powers with dire consequences. Instead they did something very strange and just have a vengeful ghost who has a small part of her backstory that she used to give gold coins to the local children for their old teeth, thus gaining her the local nickname of The Tooth Fairy.

              While I can’t really fault the writers for things not making a whole lot of sense when all the backstory info as well as a lot of connecting scenes were ripped out of the final cut, I can certainly get angry with them for the stupidity that made it into the movie. Establishing the backstory of the vengeful ghost right up front is fine, I’ll even wave away the idea that in the 19^th century gold coins were worth the same as quarters are now, whatever. I’m also down with the idea that the lonely old woman got her face burned in a fire and started wearing a porcelain mask around town. What I refuse to buy is the idea that, as the movie’s opening narration puts it, “Matilda’s burned flesh was so sensitive to light she could only go out at night.” Her inability to stand bright light ends up being the central tension mechanism for the entire movie: is it light out, are the lights on inside, do I have my flashlight, are the emergency lights coming on, stay inside the light don’t go outside of the light! That’s not ghost Matilda who’s photophobic, by the way, that’s sad old lady Matilda. That’s just not how scar tissue works. I’m also mad at the fact that a couple of children went briefly missing so the town summarily hanged an old woman, only for the kids to turn up the next day fine and dandy. America in the 19^th century was all kinds of fucked up, apparently. This all supposedly explains why she turns into a vengeful spirit who comes to collect a child’s last baby tooth, and if anyone sees her face she kills them. As far as local legends go that turn out to be real I guess that’ll do, but it’s such a stupid way to get there. She was horribly scarred by fire, just make her scared of bright lights because she’s scared of fire!

              The first thing I noticed about the movie, other than the terrible editing, was that it doesn’t really have a first act. It has that fairy tale at the beginning, then there’s a prologue set in 1990 that establishes our two main characters, Caitlin and Kyle. Then it shows Kyle’s first encounter with The Tooth Fairy, which ends up with his mom getting killed and Kyle ending up institutionalized. That’s fine for a beginning, but in the next scene we jump right to the end of the first act. Oh, and this section lasts another eleven minutes, so the running total for how much of this movie takes place in the present is now down to a sold sixty-one minutes.

              Here’s where we loop back to what I had to say about movies and rules. Clearly this section with young Kyle is supposed to do several things at one: introduce the characters, set up the plot of the rest of the movie, introduce the monster, and explain the rules of how the ghost works. It does three of those things. Not very well, but it does them. We meet teenage Caitlin and Kyle and find out they really like each other. The ghost kills Kyle’s mom and basically curses him for life. The CGI ghost is kept mostly offscreen but the glimpses we get are suitably spooky. What it doesn’t do is establish any rules at all about how this version of The Tooth Fairy works. What we’re initially told is that if a child looks at her when she comes to collect their teeth they get killed. Fair enough. When we actually see the ghost in the movie it’s after she’s zipped around Kyle’s room for a long time while he’s hiding under the covers. Right from the beginning the ghost is cheating. If she can just hang around in a kid’s room all night making noises they’re all going to look eventually. And look Kyle does and he screams at the horrible sight of the monster.

              Then he doesn’t get killed, something we were firmly promised. The camera cuts to his mom asleep in bed who starts awake when she hears his yell. She rushes to his room and meets a perfectly intact Kyle at his door. He begs her not to go in but she does anyways, and since the ghost is still in there hanging out she gets got. The kid runs into the bathroom, turns out all of the lights, then huddles in the bathtub until morning. So rather than a ghost who plays by strict rules, this is a ghost who turns up under very specific circumstances and then can just do whatever she wants.

              The movie gets worse about this as the movie continues. Directly after this we get a jarring cut to ’12 Years Later’ and a grown up Caitlin is having another in what seems to be a long list of doctor consultations for her much younger brother. He’s apparently so scared of the dark he’s unable to sleep and is in danger of having psychotic breaks. The doctors have labelled this as night terrors, for some reason, and the only person Caitlin can think of to ask for advice is Kyle, who she hasn’t spoken to since he was institutionalized.

              I can make a pretty damn good guess about what scenes were cut out here. Keep the time jump but ease us into our reintroduction to Caitlin. Have her wake her brother up in the morning for a tense breakfast, he asks if she knows anyone with night terrors, she hesitates and then admits there’s this guy she used to know and she’s been meaning to look him up but it’s been so long, they have an appointment with the doctor and they have a tender conversation on the drive to the hospital. Then we can cut to some kind of introduction to adult Kyle, maybe while he’s meeting with his therapist about his obsessive fear of the dark, this would allow the shrink to list the seemingly crazy precautions he takes, they can refer to where he’s been the last twelve years, Caitlin’s name comes up and he admits to being too scared to reach out to her. None of this is particularly good, it’s just the functional set of scenes that would get you directly to this scene in the hospital where Caitlin reaches out to Kyle about Michael without it feeling like goddamn moon logic.

              There are even more ludicrous touches. Caitlin has a boyfriend who also grew up with her and Kyle and obviously feels threatened now that he’s turned up again. He essentially forces Kyle to get a drink with him and they go to a local hick bar. There a random guy drinking there who recognizes him and starts to pick a fight. Kyle just walks out, frustrated. So far the bones of all of this are fine. Then, as Kyle is leaning against a railing for a moment, the guy from the bar just spear-tackles him and they both go flying over the railing and into the woods. Kyle freaks out that he’s in the dark suddenly and the guy gets murdered by the ghost. None of that nonsense in the bar was led up to, none of it was subsequently justified. They just needed a way to get Kyle into the woods and that’s the best they could come up with.

              Wait a second, you may be thinking, if it’s been established that The Tooth Fairy can’t get you if you’re in the light, then why isn’t she getting him the second he gets tackled into the dark woods? That’s a very good question, and the answer is that a character either needs to be completely in the light, mostly in the light, or just kind of around the light, depending on the needs of the scene. In the woods, while he’s fumbling for his flashlight, Kyle is clearly almost completely in the dark, and even after he shines a flashlight on himself his feet are absolutely fair game. The rule seems to be that if any part of your body has some light on it, you’re fine. Apparently Matilda can’t just swipe at your edges or anything. There is a glorious scene later where characters have to get down a set of stairs with only the landings being lit and the actual stairs in darkness. The characters start jumping from light pool to light pool and each time they do one of them gets picks off by the monster swooping out of the darkness. Incredibly stupid scene.

              But wait another second, you may be thinking, if it’s been established that The Tooth Fairy only gets summoned by a kid losing a tooth, what’s summoning the monster now? There’s something of an excuse in that she’s apparently been after Kyle for the last twelve years and is currently after Michael, so she’s free to pop into existence around those two at any time. But that would mean that Kyle has somehow kept himself at least partially lit continuously for a full twelve years. This also implies that exactly zero children have lost their last baby tooth in this town for the last twelve years, or at least that the ones that did were pretty uncurious. There’s exactly one throwaway line where Kyle says something sarcastic to the local sheriff about all of the child murders in the town’s history, but that goes exactly nowhere.

              I do kind of like how stupid the ending is. Kyle of course has been locked up as a suspect for all of the ghost murders, and then Matilda does him the favor of openly attacking the police station while he’s there. She’s not so much driven off as she eventually just kind stops coming back. The survivors form a little ragtag group that makes its way to the hospital to save Michael. I mean, I assume they do, we don’t get to see any of that, but a couple of the cops show up at the hospital to get killed later so I’m guessing that’s what happened. The doctors we’ve met a couple of times also tag along for a little bit until they turn out to be bad at jumping down stairways.

              Eventually everyone alive makes it to the local lighthouse, which was established earlier so props to the movie for that. They get very lucky and attack Matilda in exactly the right order to kill her. First they blast her with the lighthouse lamp, then they set her on fire, then they knock her mask off, then they hit her with the lamp again. Pretty sure that was one of the cut boss fights from ‘Bloodborne.’ The ghost evaporates, the three survivors slump together in victory, and we are done with that plotline. We get a couple of extra minutes for a kicker scene where a kid puts his tooth under a pillow and then his mom comes in and exchanges it for some coins. Take out this little scene and the entire saga of adult Caitlin and Kyle comes to a whopping fifty-nine minutes and forty-eight seconds.

              Despite its short length there’s a decent amount of nonsense in here. I didn’t even get into the Scientology-adjacent stuff about how medicine and doctors are bad and not to be trusted. When he arrives in town for the first time in twelve years Kyle goes directly to the hospital and starts talking to Michael without checking in with either the staff or Caitlin, and when she discovers that he’s done this she instantly recognizes him and gives him a hug. Kyle is said to have become a game programmer after getting fostered into adulthood while at the same time we’re told he was institutionalized for nine of the past twelve years. Emma Caulfield Ford is nineteen years older than the actor playing her younger brother. They clearly originally meant for it to be her son but hastily rewrote it for some no-doubt dumb reason. Continuity errors are constant, which is something I don’t usually care about, but when the geography shifts from the top of the lighthouse to the bottom in a single edit even I have to call a little foul. There is exactly one scene that’s just character development, and it is a brief moment when Caitlin cries in a car. That is all you’re getting. This is a movie that is not scary and not even bad in an entertaining way.

Ghost Ship (2002)

               I’m starting to form some definite opinions on Dark Castle Entertainment, the production company behind three of the recent movies I’ve watched. So far none of them have been any good, so fingers crossed for the upcoming ‘Gothika,’ I guess. The three-headed beast that rules over the still-operating company is comprised of Gilbert Adler, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis. I think because I first learned of its existence right after watching ‘What Lies Beneath,’ which Zemeckis directed, I focused a lot of my attention towards his influence on their output when the person I really should have been zeroing in on was Joel Silver.

This ... this isn't "The Love Boat," titles.

              I keep forgetting Silver’s been around since the early 80’s. His name is slapped on a ton of classic films, such as ’48 Hrs.,’ ‘Lethal Weapon,’ and ‘The Matrix.’ Let’s refer to those movies as the ones made by the “good” Joel Silver. There’s the “bad” Joel Silver as well, however, and he’s the guy who helped bring ‘Brewster’s Millions,’ ‘Richie Rich,’ and ‘Fred Claus’ into this world. I’d say the last actually good film he was involved with was 2016’s ‘The Nice Guys,’ because other than that the last decade and a half has not been kind to him. Pretty sure that Dark Castle brought out the worst in his absolutely not cocaine-tinged instincts because everything I’ve watched from this production company has been shit.

              It doesn’t take much digging to turn up some fairly shameful shenanigans going on behind the scenes for this movie. Let’s get the numbers out of the way first: this was a pretty sizeable step down budget-wise from the last movie the company had done: $20 million for ‘Ghost Ship,’ on par with the ‘House on Haunted Hill’ remake, but quite a bit less than the $42 million for ‘Thir13en Ghosts.’ It somehow earned back $68 million worldwide, allowing the schlock factory to churn on. The movie started as a spec-script by a first-time screenwriter named Mark Hanlon, who hasn’t had anything produced since. It was entitled ‘Chimera’ and while it featured ghosts and an abandoned boat it was intended to be more of a psychological horror with very little gore or violence. Here’s a link to the original draft: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/ghost_ship.html. According to Hanlon this was the version that the actors signed on for, and when they arrived for the shoot and realized how much it had been changed into a sloppy gorefest they were none too happy. I don’t often feel much sympathy for movie actors unless some truly heinous stuff went on during production, and while nobody is alleging any illegality or abuse I bet most of these actors were very angry with Mr. Silver for some time.

              The director is someone I’ve already met. This is his second and last feature film after his previous effort ‘Thir13en Ghosts.’ Which frankly surprises me, I would have completely understood if he’d been blackballed after that first one. Of course it was terrible, but more importantly it didn’t make that much money. In Hollywood terms it basically broke even. Yet for some reason Dark Castle entrusted another of its properties to a demonstrably bad director, and he doesn’t get any more work after the one that does make money? Perhaps he realized after making this movie that directing features just wasn’t for him. From what I understand there’s a lot more money in directing commercials anyways.

              Hanlon’s script was handed off to John Pogue for extensive rewrites, adding more blood and nudity and grody kills with each draft until it turned into the thing I just watched. Pogue isn’t a nobody, by the time he was handed this assignment he’d already written ‘U.S. Marshalls’ (the quasi-sequel to ‘The Fugitive’), ‘The Skulls,’ and the 2002 ‘Rollerball’ remake. Speaking of sequels he’s since moved on to directing, helming such prestigious fare as ‘Deep Blue Sea 3’ and ‘Eraser: Reboot,’ a legacy sequel to the 1996 Schwarzenegger film. These are not artistic titans, I guess is my point.

              The disappointed cast is once again made up of some prominent actors. Silver’s name still held a lot of sway in the industry at the time. Julianna Margulies stars as Maureen Epps, part of a salvage crew captained by Sean Murphy, played by Gabriel Byrne. Margulies had risen to fame as a cast member in “E.R.” but left at the end of season six in early 2000. She’d kicked around a little bit doing tv movies and guest spots. She’d had sizeable roles in movies before, but this was the highest-profile film she’d done so far. Byrne is given top billing, but his role seems to have been cut down over the course of the rewrites because he doesn’t have a lot to do here. He’d already led a ton of movies by this point, including ‘Miller’s Crossing’ and ‘The Usual Suspects.’ Isaiah Washington plays another crewmember, Greer. He was still a few years away from “Grey’s Anatomy” but was already a well-established character actor. Greasy, long-haired Munder is played by a baby Karl Urban, fresh from his recurring role as Julius Caesar on “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Alex Dimitriades and Ron Eldard round out the crew as Santos and Dodge, respectively.

              The non-crew characters of note are a mix of ghosts and antagonists. Emily Browning, probably best known for her role as Babydoll in ‘Suckerpunch,’ plays a nice ghost girl named Katie. Italian actor Francesca Rettondini really stretches her acting wings by playing an Italian character named Francsca. And the secret bad guy in the movie, named Jack Ferriman for pun reasons that will become clear later, is played by Desmond Harrington, who was in 72 episodes of “Dexter” even though I can’t remember him at all. None of the acting in this movie is particularly good, but considering that the characters range from bland to actively annoying and everyone’s decisions becoming compoundingly stupid over the course of the film, I’m going to blame the same director that made Tony Shalhoub suck on screen.

              Of course I’m going to compare this movie to 1980’s ‘Death Ship.’ Aside from the advances in special effects and editing it’s actually a very fair comparison. Instead of being stuck aboard a derelict prison ship they’re stuck aboard a derelict cruise ship, but it still features people trying to fix a boat and survive supernatural forces picking them off one by one. I also think they’re equally bad, just in different ways. The relative budget of ‘Ghost Ship’ is obviously higher, but ‘Death Ship’ had access to an actual derelict boat. The editing is terrible in both and everyone’s actions equally nonsensical. I might give the edge to ‘Death Ship’ only because the evil plan in that one is a lot more streamlined. “Ship possessed by dead Nazis out for blood” has a lot fewer moving parts than what Jack’s plan ends up being.

And they all invested well and retired.

              To briefly sum up the premise: we’re introduced to a rag-tag group of marine salvagers as they’re finishing up a long three months of hauling a sunken ship off of the ocean floor and are now hauling it to land. There’s some kind of crisis that allows the movie to establish everyone’s specials skills and the relationships between the crew members. This is all fine. They celebrate back on land just long enough to set up that Greer has a fiancé and the wedding is in about a month, putting a big ol’ death flag on his head. Everyone except Margulies’ Epps dies by the end of the movie, don’t give it another thought. As they’re toasting their own success Jack Ferriman introduces himself as a weather service pilot who thinks he spotted a large, abandoned ship in the Bering Strait. That’s the gap between Alaska and Russia, but don’t worry about anyone freezing to death, the subject literally never comes up again and people survive long periods in the ocean just fine. He offers to give them specific details to find the boat for a finder’s fee and insists on coming along. Before I twigged that he was the bad guy I had this whole screed written about how this didn’t make any sense, so I guess a small point to the movie. Everyone decides this could be a big score and away we go.

              Anyone who’s watched the movie is crying foul at this point, because the movie does not start with any of the above scenes. It starts in 1962 aboard a cruise ship we eventually learn is called the Antonia Graza. There’s a nifty little party going on up on deck with Francesca singing a number to the dancing guests. There’s a bored girl named Katie who gets persuaded to cut a modest rug with the captain. While they’re dancing a mysterious figure throws a single lever which manages to swipe a metal wire right across the deck at just above Katie’s head, cutting everyone in half. This is the only scene most people have ever seen from this movie, and the shock helps hide how badly it’s done. I don’t mean the CGI, though to modern eyes it does look a bit ropey, I mean how the wire manages to cut some people in half at the waist while people a few feet away get the wire through their mouths. Since Francesca is eventually revealed to be in on the mass murder, I went back to see what happened with her and the band after the wire deaths and the camera just doesn’t happen to look in that direction. Sloppy stuff.

              The movie is very bad at establishing and conveying information, and I don’t know if that’s the fault of the screenplay or the direction. I want to say it’s a wonderful mix of both. From reading plot synopses and checking a fan wiki I’m pretty sure the story goes something like this: Jack Ferriman was a sinner who died and went to hell. He was then picked by some evil force to return to the land of the living in order to collect souls and deliver them unto his master Satan. His method of doing so was to use a bunch of gold bars to tempt people into committing horrible sins to try to get their hands on it. For some reason he decides the best way to do this is by jumping from ship to ship, tempting people along the way. Back in 1962 he’d been on another ship called the Lorelei and managed to kill everyone there before being rescued, along with the gold, by the Antonia Graza. He then persuaded some of the crew and Francesca to murder about a thousand people between the rest of the crew and the guests. Then they all turned on each other leaving Francesca the sole survivor. Jack then kills her with a random hook that’s hanging around and marks her palm with a burn in the shape of a hook. There is exactly one other instance where someone sees a supposed ghost with that hook mark on his hand, but that ends up being an illusion so who knows what the rules are. Everyone on the ship except Katie was a sinner of some kind which gives Jack power over them, but apparently he hasn’t met his quota yet because he keeps luring people onto the boat using the gold. When they get there they always end up killing each other, adding more souls to his total. Sometime before the movie the boat got caught in a current that kept swinging it by some rocky islands, damaging the hull. He therefore specifically sought out a salvage crew that would be able to repair the ship, allowing it to continue on its soul collecting way. None of this is communicated properly to the audience. I had to do a decent amount of research and I’m still guessing at some of the connective tissue here. Like I said, Nazi ghosts possessing a ship hungry for blood is a much simpler idea.

I think I have this Cocteau Twins album on vinyl.

              The deaths are also almost all lame. The first guy gets blown up in an explosion, which is yawn. The next guy, Greer, also has a dumb death but at least there’s a decent moment leading up to it. After getting drunk on ancient champagne, he wanders into the ballroom where time rewinds around him while the camera spins in a circle. It’s not a bad effect. He’s confronted by a room of smiling and clapping guests while Francesca sultrily approaches. He announces that he knows it’s not real so he’s just going to go with it, then smooches the ghost. I’d like to think this line is a primal scream of frustration from John Pogue as he tries to finish rewrite fourteen. After spectral makeouts Francesca just strips off her clothes and leads him to an empty elevator shaft and he falls down to his offscreen death. At one point Gabriel Byrne talks to the dead captain who reveals Jack is an ageless killer but never mind because the rest of the crew bonk him over the head and toss him in a tank. A few scenes later he drowns offscreen, never mind. Dodge also dies offscreen to set up a stupid fakeout. Munder has a pretty good death conceptually, getting eaten by a massive set of gears like George Kennedy in ‘Death Ship,’ but again we don’t see any actual gore.

              The only other thing that even approaches being interesting is the pronounced and seemingly deliberate thread of misogyny and homophobia that runs through the movie. I know that it was the early 2000’s and obnoxious bro culture ruled the land, but most of the male characters constantly accuse each other of either being girls or of being gay, in very directly insulting language. It certainly struck me as rising above the normal background homophobic radiation of the time period. It starts to play with an idea when Jack taunts Dodge about how much of a chicken he is to never try for something with Epps, but then the character dies offscreen and the movie has to wrap things up in about seven minutes.

              This is an actively bad film. As in it’s not bad due to an absence of good, it’s a genuinely unpleasant experience. All of the characters were either mildly hateful or at the very least unpleasant to spend time with. Having it just be a ghost ship should have been enough but instead they had to work in this not-technically-a-demon character and add something about gold and collecting souls? I should also say that the movie does not deserve that opening. It should have happened in a 1976 giallo film called ‘Heron with the Golden Beak.’ John Saxon would be the second lead and it would have at least two eye-stabbing scenes. Cameron Mitchell would cameo and in the now out-of-print Criterion DVD issued in 2004 there’d be an entire commentary track by an audibly coked-up Quentin Tarantino. Nicolas Winding Refn wouldn’t be able to shut up about it. I would’ve liked to have watched a more interesting movie, is my point.

The Ring (2002)

               I’ll go ahead and say it: Gore Verbinski earned his time in director jail. I saw his version of ‘The Lone Ranger’ in theaters not because of his work with the Pirate of the Caribbean movies but because of the lingering fondness I felt from enjoying his 1997 slapstick comedy ‘Mousehunt’ in a theater. I’ve only recently learned that it was a commercial success, I’d assumed it was a flop because I remember seeing it completely alone and never noticed anyone talking about it. It made an unadjusted $128 million off of a $38 million dollar budget, and considering it’s a movie about Nathan Lane and Lee Evans chasing a CGI mouse around and doing Tom & Jerry gags that’s a very respectable return. Somewhere around the second Pirates movie, though, Verbinski kind of forgot that money was real and his budgets started to soar. His cowboy movie cost an adjusted $338 million and only brought in $351 million, and when other expenses are factored in it’s rumored to have cost Disney somewhere between $150 and $190 million.

Don't put your title at the end, that's annoying.

              But Verbinski had to work up to be handed that much money to set on fire, and for a few years he was one of the hottest directors out there. ‘The Ring’ didn’t just make money ($444 million worldwide from an $86 million budget), it became a trendsetter. For a while “J-Horror” was the new hotness and in the years following its release we got ‘The Grudge,’ ‘Dark Water,’ ‘The Eye,’ and several others. It’s also important to note that his Pirates trilogy brought in something in the neighborhood of $3,000,000,000. It’s true he hasn’t directed a movie since 2016’s ‘The Cure for Wellness,’ but he’s currently in post-production on his new film at the time of writing, so apparently he’s been let out of director jail. If this new one tanks he may get put back, this time in the same permanent facility as Elaine May and Frank Darabont.

              The story goes that this movie happened because producer Walter F. Parkes handed him a copy of ‘Ringu,’ the Japanese version of the expanded edition of a tv movie version of the original novel. Let’s unpack that chain of adaptations. The original novel, Ringu, was published by Koji Suzuki in 1991. It was adapted in 1995 into a tv movie which aired on Fuji tv. A slightly different cut than the one that aired was released on VHS only in Japan as “Ringu: Kanzenban,” or “Ring: The Complete Edition.” A feature film version was adapted from both the original novel and this expanded tv movie, with major changes to characters and plotlines. This is the version that was given to Verbinski. By that point in Japan there’d been two sequel novels, two sequel films, two tv series, and at least two manga adaptations. There have also been two American sequels, although you can argue how much 2017’s ‘Rings’ really counts. The American version is relatively faithful to the Japanese film, at least in terms of its overall structure. They’re both about a journalist unraveling the mystery of a video tape in an effort to save both herself and her son, and the eventual solution is also the same. Everything in the middle involving the spooky little girl and what exactly happened to her are pretty different, which is to be expected.

              I honestly couldn’t remember if this was a Fincher film or not before watching it, and I felt terrible when I realized it was directed by Verbinski. Until I actually watched it, and then I understood why I’d made that mistake. From the faded color palette to the slow and steady camera work, this has the precision and deliberate pace that I associate more with Fincher than the director of ‘Rango.’ This isn’t even a slight on Verbinski’s usual work, I really like his ability to translate cartoon slapstick into live action, it’s what I liked about ‘Mousehunt’ and the first movie and a half of his Pirates trilogy. Even people who loathed ‘The Lone Ranger’ when it was first released (and there were a lot of us) had to admit that the extended climax involving the train was incredible filmmaking. I’m not sure whether there’s any real humor in this movie at all and certainly no hijinks. It’s so far outside of what I consider his wheelhouse that I have trouble connecting his name to the images from this movie. I’ve heard good things about his 2005 film ‘The Weatherman,’ maybe it’s time to check that out.

              I guess I should lay out the premise of the film. It’s nicely encapsulated right at the beginning with a couple of teenage girls telling spooky stories to each other. One of them tells the other about this cursed video tape. The story goes that if you watch it you receive a phone call saying you only have seven days to live. The other girl accuses the first of teasing her since that’s what happened last week when she and some friends went to a cabin in the woods, down to the creepy call. A bunch of fake outs happen, to the point where I was starting to get annoyed, and then the movie establishes the warning signs to look out for: water pooling on the floor or dripping out of electronics and televisions spontaneously turning on. We don’t actually see her death, which is going to be a theme for the rest of the movie.

              Enter her aunt, a journalist named Rachel Keller and played by Naomi Watts. Watts’ career has confused me for a long time. She’ll be in big, mainstream films like this movie, the Peter Jackson ‘King Kong,’ and ‘J. Edgar,’ the Hoover biopic directed by Clint Eastwood. She’s also in a lot of artier fare, like ’21 Grams,’ ‘The Painted Veil,’ and almost everything David Lynch has turned out since 1999. But then she’ll star is absolute shit like ‘The Shaft,’ ‘Movie 43,’ and ‘Shut In.’ I guess that’s just the life of a working actor? At some point I got the impression she’d ascended to at least the lower ranks of actual movie stars, where you get to pick and choose your roles and impose some quality control. But considering that she just had a role in the fucking ‘Emmanuelle’ remake I guess she’s still grinding away. Anyway she’s very good in this.

              While attending her niece’s funeral she overhears some teens gossiping and puts together the story that all four kids who watched the videotape died on the same day at the same time and decides there’s a story in it. She heads over to the cabin and pretty quickly locates the tape. She instantly watches it, and I had to fully pause the movie to furiously scribble some notes. At this point she’s already aware that her 16-year old niece died from an incredibly unlikely heart attack, her secret boyfriend killed himself, and the two other kids died in a car accident, all at precisely the same time. Even if one were to suppose a vast conspiracy with tendrils reaching into surrounding hospitals and law enforcement, having them all die at the same time would be weird enough to catch someone’s attention, which is exactly what happened with Rachel. I guess it’s possible she went to the cabin with the expectation that she was about to start pulling some truly long thread that would unravel into a huge scandal, but nothing about her demeanor or what she tells her colleagues at the newspaper backs that up. That really just leaves a supernatural explanation, in which case why watch the videotape yourself? I guess that’s part and parcel of driving up to the cabin, there’s no point in obtaining the tape if you’re not going to watch it, but why take that chance? This is just a fancier way of stating the usual horror movie complaint ‘why did the character do the dumb thing?’ The answer is so the movie can happen, but Rachel is fairly quick to understand the nature of the threat after this point, I guess I’m just a little annoyed that she was dumb at the start. I wrote in big letters in my notes, ‘What did she think was going to happen?’

              So despite getting the phone call saying she was going to die in seven days she dubs a copy and shows it to her ex-boyfriend, a professional film editor. I’d like to say at this point that I’m sure the actor Martin Henderson is a talented individual, but despite the fact that he’s clearly the co-lead in this movie he’s got the face and screen presence of a bit player and whenever he’d pop up in a scene I’d be surprised all over again that he was still in the movie.

Sure, pet the horse, it'll be fiiiiiiine.

              I like that what ends up saving Rachel and what allows the film series to continue on endlessly (and inspire a huge number of other films that follow the ‘curse as communicable virus’ template, like the ‘It Follows’ and ‘Smile’ movies), the fact that she copied the cursed tape and showed it to someone else, is played so nonchalantly on the screen. The act isn’t given a whole lot of emphasis, it’s presented as just a normal thing to do, which it is. If she’s going to have a tape manipulated by someone else it’s better to do it to a copy and not the original. Mind you, this does end up biting her on the ass when her son ends up watching the thing, adding a ticking clock on top of the already ticking clock.

              Let’s talk briefly about her son Aidan, played by David Dorfman. I didn’t watch the movie when it first released, but even back then I read movie reviews for enjoyment, and I remember a lot of complaints and confusion about why her son was so creepy from the start, completely independently from the cursed videotape. His performance is a lot, and absolutely not the fault of the actor. This is clearly what Verbinski was going for. Aidan is preternaturally calm and composed, always speaking in full sentences and having no visible emotions. He’s always a step ahead of his mom in chores and preparations, even calling her by her first name like she’s a sibling. Rachel doesn’t seem particularly unorganized or unprofessional, she’s a little rough around the edges but that plays into her reporter characterization. I’m sure they explain this in the commentary track, but my guess is that Rachel’s son being creepy is meant to parallel the eventual reveal that Samara, the ghost girl behind all of this, was also a creepy kid which is what led to her being killed by her mother. It doesn’t quite work with the semi-twist at the end, but I think that was their intention. The performance does end up being very distracting for the first third of the movie.

              The middle section of the film might be my favorite, which is not to slight the ending. The slow unraveling of what happened to Samara and how the cursed videotape came to be was actually very well done, I thought. I’ve read some reviews that called the plot confusing, and while I admit that not every I was crossed or every T dotted I got the gist: a creepy psychic girl with the ability to project thoughts into other peoples heads or onto film was tossed down a well by her adoptive mother. She survived at the bottom for seven days, thus the survival period of the curse. Eventually the cabin the teens stayed in was built over the well and the angry ghost projected her thoughts onto the videotape. As far as explanations for an urban legend go, that’s not too bad.

              What really made it gripping for me were two sections. One was when I remembered that Brian Cox was in the film after Rachel tracks down Samara’s adoptive dad. Her first confrontation with him is super-tense and very well done. I may just enjoy the acting talents of Brian Cox. The other was the scene with the horse on the ferry, which had me physically recoiling from the screen a couple of times. When it was all done I was scrunched as far back as I could literally be and still be seated. The escalation was simply amazing, there were about three different moments when I thought they were about to wrap things up but it just kept going and it ends in such an upsetting way I had to pause the movie again, even though it didn’t actually show much.

              That restraint extends to the film’s money shot, the moment when Samara crawls out the tv set. The imagery has permeated pop culture to the point that it’s actually a stale reference by now, something that would’ve been beaten into the ground by Mad tv at the time. But we only actually see it in the movie once. In fact, over the course of the entire movie Samara only kills two people we actually meet and five in total. For such a popular movie that’s not a huge body count, but the way the movie builds up to it the final kill very well done. Eventually Rachel and her ex return to the cabin as her seven days are set to expire and uncover the well. She manages to fall down and have a fun little dream sequence with Samara. She recovers her remains and the curse marks on her arms disappear as her time limit expires and she isn’t ghost murdered. The police get called, everyone’s got safety blankets on and they muse to themselves that she’ll finally be at rest. The camera even shows them possibly reconciling, all happy and smiley with some actual light in the scene for once.

And they lived happily ever after.

              Then we realize there’s about twenty minutes left in the movie and start to get squirrely again. There’s a wonderful moment where Rachel explains to her son, who’s been having conversations with Samara ever since he saw the tape, that she finally helped her and set her free. Her son’s eyes go wide and he urgently asks her why she did that. We cut back to the ex, who hears the tv switch on, and he realizes along with everyone else that the curse is still fully in effect and his time just expired. He recoils back from the emerging figure as Rachel furiously races over in a futile effort to stop what’s happening.

              Afterwards there’s a montage that’s supposed to show Rachel putting the pieces together and realizing that what saved her was copying the tape and showing it to someone else, not anything she did to recover Samara’s remains. The montage even includes a little snippet of tape from a psychological evaluation of the little girl where she admits that she wants to hurt people. The very end of the movie is her holding Aidan’s hands while helping him push the buttons to make another copy of the tape. She explains that this is going to save his life. He soberly asks her what’s going to happen to the person she shows it to, and the movie ends on her grim silence.

              There was originally going to be a wraparound for the film, featuring Chris Cooper. He apparently played a child-murder convinced he was killing for the Lord. Rachel was going to interview him near the beginning of the movie and then deliver the tape to him at the very end. It ended up being cut due to a combination of a recognizable actor having that small of a role in the film being distracting to the test audiences and the correct realization that Rachel having no answer to her son’s question was a better note to end on.

              This is a very good film and it more than justifies its status as a sleeper-hit upon release and its status as a classic now, not just a cult one. The wave of J-Horror remakes that it kicked off might not have turned out anything as artistically successful as this, but a bunch of people got to watch some new type of spooks which isn’t nothing. The reputation of its sequel, the imaginatively titled ‘The Ring Two,’ is decidedly more mixed, and I’m not sure I want to sully the ending of this movie by learning what happened afterwards. I am also incredibly annoyed that it took reading up on this film to realize that the title refers not only to the ring of light peeping through the cover on the well that Samara was trapped in, but also the ring of the phone call that signals you have a week to live. I’m a little disappointed in myself, that’s the kind of pun I should have noticed right away.

Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

               This movie is kind of special. On the one hand it’s very much of its time, a relatively low-budget horror remake that technically earns its R-rating with swearing and on-screen violence but without much nudity or any truly visceral gore. On the other hand its script could be taught as an example of a screenplay clearly reverse-engineered from producer notes. Here we clearly have the twin requirements of a specific gonzo location that everything has to bend to fit while also including as many nods and details from the 1960 original as possible. On yet a third hand it’s a badly made film from a director of commercials who clearly doesn’t know how to build a long-form narrative. If you want to cram a fourth hand in there it also contains the purest example of something I thought had been parodied into the ground: the sassy Black sidekick who’s only in the movie to make quips to the white characters.

This does accurately capture the tone.

              This was the second movie from Dark Castle Entertainment after ‘House on Haunted Hill’ and also their second William Castle remake in a row. Considering that the film only brought in an inflation-adjusted $122 million from a $75 million budget I can see why they stopped putting out Castle remakes after this. The director is first-timer Steve Beck who’s only directed one other movie, the 2002 flick ‘Ghost Ship,’ which is second to next on my list. This both excites and terrifies me. Before that he worked as a commercial director for clients like GMC and McDonald’s and as an art director at ILM on movies like ‘The Abyss’ and ‘Hunt for Red October.’ I think he’s a case much like Jan de Bont where he’s very talented in one area, the skill set of which doesn’t necessarily transfer over to directing. The screen story is credited to Robb White, writer of the original, while the screenplay is credited to Neal Marshall Stevens and Richard D’Ovidio. Stevens, frequently under the pen name of Benjamin Carr, is a very prolific writer of schlock. He’d previously written such classics as ‘Retro Puppet Master’ and would go on to pen ‘Death Streamer.’ He’s part of Charles Band’s little stable of artists. D’Ovidio, by contrast, only has a handful of credits. Before this movie he wrote ‘Exit Wounds’ starring Steven Seagal and DMX and directly after worked on ‘The Call’ starring Halle Berry. According to the internet James Gunn also took an uncredited pass, and he’s probably as happy as anyone his name’s not attached as this script is terrible.

              Whatever else I have to say about this movie, they were able to round up some decent names for the cast. The barest of bones of the original plot is kept involving a family whose eccentric uncle has left them a house full of ghosts. They change the family name from Zorba to Kriticos and upgrade from Charles Herbert to Tony Shalhoub as the father of the family, Arthur. Shalhoub’s most recent movie was the 1999 classic ‘Galaxy Quest,’ and he was just coming off the cancellation of his sitcom ‘Stark Raving Mad,’ where he played a horror writer getting into wacky hijinks with with his editor, played by Neil Patrick Harris. I was really bummed when they cancelled that show, I was watching. His uncle Cyrus actually appears in this version and is played by F. Murray Abraham. At the time he was pinging back and forth between slop and decent roles like any other working actor of his caliber. Arthur’s daughter Kathy is played by Shannon Elizabeth, who was kind of a big deal at the time. She’d just done ‘American Pie 2’ and ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,’ and it’s harder to imagine two movies more indicative of this specific period of time. His son Bobby is played by child actor Alec Roberts, who seems to have left the industry after this. The evil lawyer is named Ben Moss this time around and is a much smaller role. He’s played by JR Bourne, who is such a ‘hey it’s that guy’ character actor that I’m going to assume I saw him in “The Mentalist” and move on.

              There isn’t a character directly corresponding to Margaret Hamilton’s Elaine Zacharides in this film. I guess the closest we get is Embeth Davidtz as Kalina Oretzia, a kind of ghost-rights activist who’s in the very beginning of the movie and then absent for a solid forty-five minutes. Davidtz has been in a ton of stuff but to me she’s most recognizable as Sheila, Ash’s medieval love interest in ‘Army of Darkness.’ You’ll also notice that I didn’t mention anyone playing Arthur’s wife Jean, and that’s because she starts the movie dead for plot reasons we’ll get into later. She’s eventually played by Kathryn Anderson, who was mainly a stunt person.

              Then there are two characters who had to be invented for this version. The easiest to explain is Mathew Lillard as Dennis Rafkin, a psychic hired by Cyrus to track down ghosts for him. This was just a year before he played Shaggy in the live-action Scooby Doo movie, and I have to say I formed a long-lasting dislike of him based on his involvement in that alone. I’ve softened on him considerably over the years, especially once casting agents learned he was a pretty good dramatic actor. He’s kind of the second lead of the movie and generally enjoyable, though his character descends into nonsensical by the end along with everything else.

              Then there’s Rah Digga as Maggie Bess. I was previously unfamiliar with Digga, the reason probably being that she’s not really an actress. Instead she’s a musician who acts every once in a while. She’s a member of Flipmode Squad, the rap collective lead by Busta Rhymes. She had previously only appeared in music videos and as Rasheeda in the Beyoncé-starring “Carmen: A Hip Hopera.” Maggie plays the nanny to Arthur’s kids, and if you’re familiar at all with the original movie you’ll instantly note the problem here. A central point of the 1960 version is that the family is flat broke and thus has to move into the spooky house because they literally have nowhere else to go. Here the family is certainly portrayed as financially strained, everyone’s living in a too-tiny apartment as that’s all Arthur can afford as a math teacher. He even initially tries to decline the house as he’s unable to afford to pay any property taxes. But they still manage to set aside money for a nanny. It’s also unclear why a single trip to look at a house requires said nanny to come along when one of the two children is played by an actress who was twenty-seven at the time of filming. I have a lot to say about how this movie treats this character.

              Let’s get the plot out of the way so we can get to the interesting stuff: we open with a military-style operation lead by Cyrus to capture a twelfth ghost. Rafkin is there to track it. It all goes wrong and while the spirit is captured Cyrus supposedly dies. We then cut to Arthur, who is sad that his wife recently died in a fire. They’re told by his uncle’s lawyer that he’s inherited Cyrus’s house. They go to see it and it’s this big plexiglass structure that’s more of a mechanical device than any place to live. Turns out Cyrus built the house as a machine powered by ghosts to open a portal to something called Hell’s Eye, allowing the person running the machine to access all knowledge from the past, present, and future. It’s revealed that Cyrus faked his death and plans to put Arthur’s children in jeopardy to force him to sacrifice himself and become the thirteenth ghost, thus completing the machine. Everyone runs around for a while until they disrupt the evil plan and everyone but the family and their nanny die, the end.

              The description sounds stupid because it accurately reflects the story, but at the same time I can absolutely understand every single decision that led to this script getting churned out. The very basic premise stays roughly the same: rich eccentric collects twelve spirits then dies and leaves the house to his financially imperiled nephew. While in the original the collection is hand-waved away as just a life-long interest of the dead guy, here it’s got to be part of some sinister plan. Cyrus’s end goal is pretty irrelevant for the needs of the movie, it just has to involve thirteen ghosts and be bad, so they decided the ghosts would power a machine to do something that sounds evil. Since the house was such a prominent part of the movie it seems obvious to combine these two things and voila: you have a machine powered by ghosts that doubles as a house.

              It’s clear that the design for the house came early in the production process. I have no doubt that it’s where most of the money went. It’s this structure with two floors and a basement, all assembled out of metal and plexiglass. Since they’re glass most of the walls are transparent, although there are enough metal panels and corners that it can get away with never giving us a clear line-of-sight all of the way through to the other side. Most of the plexiglass panels (it’s supposedly some other substance) have Latin scribbled across them in marker. These are eventually explained as spells used to keep the ghosts at bay. There’s also b-roll footage of gears and wheels located somewhere conveniently offscreen that can get inserted anytime the film needs to shift up the architecture or, in one very obvious instance, fill some time with a montage of nothing.

They thought this guy was scary.

              In the original the house was just a nice house and the family lived there alongside the ghosts for some time before the climax of the movie. Since this diabolical machine pretending to be a residence is such an obviously spooky location and the movie was clearly going for an R rating with gory deaths the film would need to take place over one terrible night. That way the ghosts can be all scary and gory and rush at the camera and stab people until they’re all bloody and dead and stuff. This, coupled with the plot no longer being about the search for Cyrus’s hidden money but instead about foiling his evil plot, means that the lawyer character doesn’t have to stick around once they’re at the house. Thus he’s the first to go at the thirty-five minute mark, bisected sideways by a closing plexiglass panel. The two halves slump to the ground independently. It’s by far the grossest death in the movie.

              Since this time around the ghosts are actively malevolent and trying to kill people, we need someone on hand to exposition dump to the characters and the audience. In the original that was Cyrus’s old partner Elaine, here it’s Rafkin. It’s telegraphed early on that his character is going to die, so they do a balancing act on whether he’s a good or a bad guy for the entire film. When we first see him he’s kind of the voice of reason during the dangerous ghost capture. He’s also clearly tormented by his psychic visions, which seem completely out of his control. This all makes him sympathetic, but then when a couple of other characters confront them about their ghost-capturing activities he makes a snide Greenpeace joke. He gains entrance to the house along with the family by pretending to be an employee of the power company. He’s there to get the money he feels Cyrus owes him, but when he realizes that the ghosts are starting to get released he immediately drops the act and tells Arthur directly that his family is in danger and he needs to leave. He arguably misses his chance to escape because he took time to do so. His character is insulted over the course of the movie for helping to capture all of the ghosts, to which he has the very reasonable response that with his psychic condition he’s not super-employable doing anything else. I was pretty much on his side during this whole debate, but the movie apparently feels he has stuff to atone for. He ends up sacrificing himself to save Arthur and when we later see his ghost he seems pretty content about his fate.

              But we can’t have the movie just be about trying to stop Cyrus, Arthur has to be personally motivated. I personally think that saving his kids from being killed by ghosts is motivation enough, but apparently the producers disagreed because it turns out that the fourth ghost turns out to be Arthur’s wife Jean. It’s info-dumped at a certain point that Cyrus needed twelve specific kinds of ghosts to power the machine. The plans were originally drawn up by a fifteenth century monk named Basileus who was possessed by a demon, so it’s very lucky that six centuries later the exact ghosts as specified in his plans all exist at the same time. While Cyrus directly confirms that he involved Arthur and his family because he knew that as a father he would sacrifice himself for his children, and Rafkin claims that he sought out Jean’s ghost specifically, it’s never made clear if Cyrus set up her death. Which he kind of had to’ve, considering that she died in a manner specifically useful for his ghost machine. Not sure if that line got cut for time or if it just didn’t occur to any of the various screenwriters.

              Some of the other tweaks aren’t story-related, just updates to reflect the fact that it’s been forty years since the original. In the original version there’s a little romance between Arthur’s daughter and the greedy lawyer. Since he’s out of the movie at the end of the first act they need something else for the daughter to do, and for the most part that’s nothing. There’s exactly one scene where she gets to do anything, and the focus is rather effectively pulled away from her by the naked, bloody ghost. This is after the house has been set in motion by their entrance, causing the ghosts to slowly be released one by one. The sixth ghost is a naked lady covered in stab wounds and it’s implied that the nice bathroom was originally hers, as the camera keeps flipping back and forth between Kathy admiring the nice, clean facilities and everything being covered in blood. The dead lady slips into the bathtub and watches with some confusion as Kathy starts filling it with water and splashing the blood up in her face. Then her father comes to tell her they’re leaving and all that imagery goes away. Why cast an ‘it’ girl of the moment and then give her basically nothing to do?

              Once you’ve constructed this sputtering little engine of a script, unfortunately you’re kind of constrained about the sort of ending you can put out. Clearly Cyrus has to secretly be alive because someone has to die in the bloody climax and this isn’t the kind of movie that doesn’t have an inexplicably happy ending. This means that he has to have a secret accomplice, which turns out to be that ghosts-right activist from before. We see a flash of Cyrus earlier in another scene and there he has a bloody throat from his death in the junkyard. When he’s revealed to be alive they never bother to explain why he still has makeup on his throat to make him look dead. Presumably it’s so if anyone spots him they’ll think he’s a ghost. At this point the various parties have split up to look for a way to stop the machinery from opening a portal to hell or whatever is going on and Kalina and Maggie have teamed up. They make it to the center of the house and confront a still-living Cyrus. Kalina promptly bonks Maggie over the head and then turns simpering and lovey-dovey in front of her man. She’d hadn’t been a fun person up to this point, all judgy and shouty and barking orders, but it did at least seem to be a coherent character. This turn comes out of nowhere and is so unjustified that I’m not even mad about it. It’s nothing I could have predicted based on the information given so fine, have her be a traitor, makes as much sense as anything else in the movie.

              This is about the same time that Rafkin spontaneously grows a spine and decides to help Arthur get his kids back. It’s true that Arther promises to pay him what he’s owed if they make it out of the house alive, but I doubt anyone there believed that. He’d also been getting flashforwards to his death, maybe he just made peace with his fate and didn’t bother to tell the audience. I’m focusing on it because it comes at the end of a long stretch of stupid. The two of them decide to detach one of the plexiglass windows covered in writing and walk down the basement hallways with it in front of them as a shield. It’s just as awkward on screen as it sounds. Soon enough both they and the ghosts realize that hallways generally have two directions and just start attacking them from behind. Rafkin decides that Arthur needs to live more than he does and shoves him in a corner with the plexiglass window in front of him. The ghosts do a number on Rafkin and he dies. Before they can start in on a cowering Arthur a recording of the final spell gets blasted throughout the house and the ghosts answer its call. Leaving an overwhelmed Arthur crying by himself.

Cheer up, less than a year until "Monk" starts!

              When I watched this scene I had a sudden vision of a tired, annoyed Tony Shalhoub preparing for his fourth take, crammed into a corner of a nonsense set with a plane of plexiglass propped in front of him, crew members crowded around just out of shot, as he’s commanded to yet again let loose a set of sobs over the death of Matthew Lillard at the hands of spooky ghosts. Sometimes acting is just silly, and I guess you have to make your peace with that.

              So it all looks hopeless at the end. The traitor Kalina has lied to Arthur that sacrificing himself will stop the machine when in reality it’ll add the last little bit of energy needed to open the portal. The kids were kidnapped a good half an hour ago, so when they pop up in the middle of a bunch of spinning blades with the ghosts surrounding them it seems as good a use of them as any. By this point Kalina is dead, betrayed by Cyrus, and there’s this weird moment where everything slows down and Arthur takes a moment to study all twelve ghosts. I guess the effects department insisted that their work get highlighted? He sees Cyrus and realizes his uncle is still alive and we get to see a fight between Tony Shalhoub and F. Murray Abraham. Cyrus has Arthur on the ground and is busy telling him that his death is the only thing that will save his children when suddenly the recording of the spell controlling the ghosts starts having hip-hop scratches in it.

              We need to back up to establish a couple of things: the very sloppy magic system in the film begins and ends with ‘ghosts have to obey spells in Latin.’ This includes both written and spoken words, thus the scribbles on the plexiglass and a trick that was established in the very first scene: blasting spell recordings at ghosts. Maggie, who was knocked out earlier in that very room and more or less forgotten about, has woken up and found the full sound mixing board that of course is necessary to play reel-to-reel tapes one specific time. She starts moving dials back and force and generally ruining things, which since she’s a Black lady means that the chanting gets scratched up, DJ-style.

              We really need to talk briefly about Maggie. She’s ostensibly the family’s nanny, though I will remind you that one of the children is played by an actress of twenty-seven. The other was seven, but Maggie’s almost never with him during the movie. She’s also a very bad role model, openly cursing and criticizing the rest of the family’s decisions. This is clearly meant to be affectionate and endearing, but the camera and the movie as a whole never really treat her as a member of the family. It’s just empty wisecracks and sass-talking. I noticed early on that the camera almost never takes her into account when it’s framing a scene. She never gets a closeup, never gets a cutaway, she’s always crowded off to one side behind everyone else or sometimes even just offscreen during a line read. Unlike the kids she doesn’t get a set piece detailing a ghost encounter, none of the plans take her into effect, she’s clearly an afterthought to the other characters. Someone very dishonest could argue that this is all clever on the part of the script, getting the audience to forget about her and then having her be crucial to foiling the bad guy’s evil scheme. Except no, she just messes with a sound board for no actual reason and when she does it comes out all hip-hoppy because she’s Black, of course it does. She’s the one who actually foils the evil plan and saves everyone, but since it’s by complete accident she’s not given the proper credit by the other characters and ends the film as just another jokey afterthought.

              I’m used to endings for these things descending into nonsense, but this one’s just terrible. Because the spell is interrupted the ghosts turn on Cyrus and throw him into the blades spinning around the kids, essentially disintegrating him. Rafkin’s ghost appears to a bloody, exhausted Arthur and says the following words: “Trust me, Arthur, it’s not over yet. You can finish this. You still have the power in you. It’s just a matter of how you use it. Go to your kids, they need you.” At this Arthur picks himself and smiles, although I’m not sure why because all of that was nonsense. The spell has been broken, Cyrus is dead, the kids are sitting in the middle of a storm of spinning knives, what power is he talking about? Then all Arthur does is jump through a gap in the spinning blades and huddle with his kids while the entire house blows up around them. A house made up of metal and reinforced glass that just shatters in a massive explosion. They would all instantly be dead, but of course when everything subsides they’re shaken up but just fine. So what exactly did Arthur do to ‘finish’ anything? The plan was already disrupted, the house already in the process of tearing itself apart, apparently his power was being a meat shield? Then Maggie, who survived just fine without Arthur, has one last wise crack about quitting this nanny job and we are out.

              This script is a mess in several different directions. I didn’t even mention that they show that if you throw a flare through a ghost it temporarily disrupts it, but they never bother to tell us why. I get picking Arthur because you can threaten his kids, but why specifically include his dead wife among the ghosts when she doesn’t actually do anything for the plot? They establish a big briefcase full of money by having the lawyer grab it from the basement, but after he dies it never comes up again and presumably gets destroyed along with the house.

              The size and complexity of the house makes me think that someone on the pre-production team got a little over-ambitious with this movie. They went all-in early with that design and it warped the rest of the movie around it. This obviously affected the script, but since it also set everything in see-through corridors this also dictated the kinds of lenses being used, the angles they could get, people being on the set making sure nobody thirty feet away on the other side of the house was in the shot, it must have been a nightmare. Couple that with the very badly explained ghost glasses (which seem to let you hear the ghosts as well as see them) and a terrible editing job and for long s

tretches of the movie it’s like everything is operating on dream-logic. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original but I liked it for what it was, and while I still maintain that this is exactly the kind of movie that would be perfect for a remake there were a set of early decisions that more or less demanded that the final movie turn out like this.