Rating: 3 / 10

Starring

Joshua Jackson, Rachael Taylor

Plot

Ben and Jane go to Japan. They almost hit and kill a girl in their car. Terror ensues. Re-run any adapted Asian horror flick remade for our dumbed-down audiences.

The Good

The best part about this movie was that it was not two hours long, because people would have walked out. The original Thai picture actually was not terrible, yet this remake struggles for 85 minutes.

Yet, believe it or not, Joshua Jackson is actually pretty good, breaking a curse that has claimed Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jessica Alba, (not that making Jessica Alba look like a bad actress is an accomplishment).

The Bad

Take a tired attempt to breathe new life into American horror cinema, fill it with (sometimes) credible actors and subtract any character development that might have occurred during the course of a full-length feature film. There is the equation for computing how good “Shutter” will be.

The usual laundry list of complaints comes up: It’s boring, nobody cares about the characters or their fates and, let’s be honest, people are sick of these trends. American horror movies were great, so why do people not write them anymore? It will be a sad day when Rob Zombie is the leader in American horror cinema.

The Lowdown

Yes, there were some legitimately scary parts where the audience jumped in the theater in unison. Yet the only other thing the crowd did in unison was hate the rest of this movie.

To the people who enjoy a lot of the Asian horror adaptations, “Shutter” might be rewarding.

For the rest of us, all there is to do is sit back and wait for the continued flooding of our theaters with foreign horror remakes. This is not a bad thing necessarily; it just has not been a good thing yet.