Don't Look Up: DVD Review
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Page 1 of 3 E1 / 98 Minutes / 2009 / Rated R / Street Date: July 27, 2010
Ghost stories, if done correctly, can give you goose bumps, send chills down your spine, and do other clichéd things to you and your bodily fluids. That’s why I love them. I challenge them to scare the crap out of me – figuratively, of course. I am also a fan of J-Horror, which is the genre of the original movie that Don’t Look Up is based on: Joyu-Rei. The J-Horror genre has produced such gems as Premonition, my favorite, and Dark Water. It’s given us the gross-out movie Infection and even the underrated Ju-Rei: The Uncanny. I’m cautiously optimistic when I hear that the US wants to make its own version of a J-Horror film, because of its mixed results. They’ve had successes; Think of: The Ring based on Ringu, and The Grudge based on Ju-On and failures: Pulse and Dark Water (mentioned above) from the movie of the same name. Often, the viewer is better off skipping the remake and just watching the original. And I assure you, no one has ever been seriously harmed by having to read subtitles for an hour and a half. The success of a remake adapted from a foreign film depends on tweaking your movie for a slightly different audience. Let’s face it; cultural conventions are different, and certain genres (J-Horror in this case) have their signature trademarks, so if you want to make an American version of an Asian film, the director (in this case the well-known director Fruit Chan) needs to tailor it for an American audience and tone down the elements that will make the viewer think of a different movie than the one he or she is watching. This is the first strike against the film; the “J” influence is very heavy-handed; we see everything from pale, clammy arms snaking their way out of a backpack on an unsuspecting victim’s back to strangle him, to the long, black haired pre-pubescent woman who, in all her fury, relentlessly stalks and kills anyone who gets within shouting range of her. Apparently this time, our vengeful little queen makes a swarm of flies do most of her dirty work, though it’s not really explained why she’s covered with them. Personally, watching ghostly maniacal insects isn’t my thing. I do have to give kudos for some of the over-the-top elements in the film: I never thought I’d see a woman walking down a catwalk with a fetus swinging between her legs. Pretty entertaining in an “I-should-avert-my-eyes-but-can’t” sort of way.
The second strike against this film deals with the acting – or lack thereof – of the main character, Marcus, played by Reshad Strik. Wow. He must have graduated from the same acting school as Hayden Christensen: The Academy of No Talent. This guy was off in delivering just about all of his lines and I rolled my eyes heavenward every time he attempted to show some sort of emotion that was even remotely complex. His “extra-sensory” fits looked more like bad epileptic seizures. It’s quite an uphill battle for a film to be successful being handicapped by the lead actor. Part of the battle is won by the always-great Kevin Corrigan. His turn as the grumpy gaffer was spot on, and Lothaire Bluteau, who plays the Romanian Grigore, locations manager/personal slave to the producer has some hilarious lines and steals several of the scenes that he’s in. The third strike (and yeeer out!) of this movie is the way that it’s shot. In one of the extras, a crew member explains how they had to take a Hollywood set and make it look dreary and a little scary for the scenes shot there. Although I think that a few of these scenes were successful, particularly the flashback scene of our poor antagonist being murdered, I don’t think that enough was done to make the entire film look a little more foreboding. I wanted to see a dingy and depressing and slightly demonic atmosphere in which the movie crew need to walk around in every day. Some of the scary supernatural shots lose some of their punch (the ghost in the mirror didn’t give me any sort of chill) because of the lack of moodiness of the entire film. |
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