NOW ON DVD

SHUTTER
Rated PG-13

Joshua Jackson, Rachael Taylor, Megumi Okina, David Denman, John Hensley
Brian’s Rating       

I’m not sure what ghosts look like, or even if they actually exist, but a certain group of filmmakers keeps showing us the same apparition over and over again and I’m getting tired of it.

In The Ring, The Grudge, and now Shutter, a pale-skinned female with hollow eyes and jet-black hair outfitted in a cotton dress is sent to haunt us. The common thread linking these movies is the behind-the-scenes involvement of Asian producers or writers, so perhaps this apparition is a particularly frightening image to them. But for my money, I’ll take that masked creep from the Saw movies or that machete-wielding Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy over this anorexic ghoul any day.

Which is not to say that these movies aren’t scary. It’s just that we’re entitled to a little innovation now and then and this gal has had her fifteen minutes of fame.

Shutter, now on DVD, is a predictable, mediocre fright film with some nice shots of Tokyo and not much else.