Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

Fish Flavored Ice Cream By Michael C. Riedlinger Editor-In-Chief             What does Hollywood do once all the good Japanese horror films have been remade into crappy American horror films? They move on to other Asian countries, that’s what. Sorry folks, not much of a punchline, but then, Shutter isn’t much of a movie.             A remake of a Thai film, this is a straight up ghost story. A young couple head to Japan on their honeymoon where the husband (Joshua Jackson, The Mighty Ducks, Dawson’s Creek) has a new job as a photographer… for a company he used to work for while he lived in Japan the first time… Yes, it is that much of a stretch. While they are tooling around the countryside, they smash into a young woman on the road and total their rental. From there, weird blurs begin to appear in their photographs. A real pain in the ass if you’re a photographer, but our man Ben writes it off as bad film. The wife (Rachael Taylor, See No Evil, Transformers), on the other hand, hears that it may be a spirit, so when she starts seeing ghosts on the subway, she goes to a guy who happens to specialize in spirit photographs.             Ritsuo (James Kyson Lee, Heroes) seems to be the only person who knows what is going on. Maybe he saw the original? He advises Jane to see a medium and convinces her that these spirits are certainly real. See, he has a collection of real photos that sit in a locked room with salt around the door. That last tid-bit might have been an important observation, but Jane and her husband Ben never make it. After all, if they realized such a simple way to ward off the spirits, how would they ever be attacked? Actually, they aren’t attacked much anyway, come to think of it.

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            The husband, Ben, has two buddies who just scream SLIMEBALLS and it eventually turns out that the ghost has something against all three of these American boobs. She kills one, drives one mad, and follows Ben home for a final showdown of sorts. In the entire time, you might be startled by a typical “gotcha” moment once, if you’re already edgy. There really isn’t anything creepy about any of the ghost moments, and the stupidity of the characters is really more frightening than the parts that should scare us. At one point, Jane asks if they even have ice cream in Japan. Why she would think they don’t is a mystery, but Ben assures her that they do, but it’s all fish flavored. That groaning sound isn’t a ghost, it’s anyone in the audience with more than two brain cells.             Eventually, the couple makes it home to New York and the movie isn’t over, so we can be pretty sure the ghost isn’t gone either. Of course, it comes out that Ben’s two sleazy buddies gang raped the dead girl while he took pictures and that’s why she went after them. Jane doesn’t take well to the news and leaves Ben on his own, and I’m sure you can figure out what happens from there. It is difficult, to say the least, to fear an antagonist who you know is justified. In fact, after you realize what jerks Ben and his pals are, you’ll probably end up cheering for the ghost, even as Jane does her best Naomi Watts impression. All in all, avoid this film if you can. If you catch it on cable one day, maybe in a non-PG13 “unrated” version, maybe it’ll be worth the 85 minutes of life that you’ll never get back. Oh, how the Might Ducks have fallen.