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The afterlife coughs up another screeching-mad, pasty chick in Shutter, the third Asian horror rehash in as many months.
One Missed Call with Edward Burns was repurposed from the original Japanese, you may recall, while The Eye, starring Jessica Alba as a gal with possessed peepers, was regurgitated Korean. Now Shutter, based on the 2004 Thai thriller, gives us Dawson's Creek Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor as Ben and Jane, a newly-married couple recently transplanted to Tokyo (he's a fashion photographer on a high-end shoot) who end up stalked by a straggly ghost. How come? Because while on their honeymoon driving along a desolate rural road, Jane accidentally struck and killed a girl. Or at least she's pretty sure she did. Trouble is, despite what Jane saw, there was no body on the road to back up her belief. You know what that means.
Returning to Tokyo, the newlyweds settle in. But ghostly images begin appearing in Ben's work and Jane grows convinced these milky apparitions are signs the girl she hit is 1) dead and 2) trying to tell her something and 3) ticked. Ben balks at first, but Jane forges ahead using the photos as clues, uncovering the spirit's identity and the mystery surrounding her demise.
And you know what this means, too.
Fact is, if you've seen The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water or any Asian horror redo in the past half-decade, there's nothing here you haven't seen -- and been more scared of -- before. Then again, if Shutter was good, would you be reading this on a Saturday because the studio declined to pre-screen it? At this point, the lack of a preview for critics is as much the mark of a sub-par movie as the Alan Smithee moniker directors used to slap on productions they had disowned.
Most disappointingly, despite the foreign locales, the filmmakers never achieve the sense of discombobulated eeriness that resonated so effectively in The Grudge. Instead, Shutter meanders, propped up by false jolts and saw-it-coming deaths, each more unremarkable than the last.
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Both lead actors are just fine, thanks, with Jackson mistaking depth for the ability to scramble back into corners in a hurry, while Taylor -- the Australian best recognized as the improbably hot computer programmer in Transformers -- simply doesn't possess the emotional gravitas of Naomi Watts in The Ring or the wide-eyed jitteriness of Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge.
Every time she rounds an ominous corner, she only looks about as scared as a supermodel nearing a weigh-scale.
(This film is rated 14-A)