So Friday was a day off for me, after a long evening in Norfolk getting doused with beer by James Storm and knocked around by Scott Steiner. I felt I deserved some downtime, and so I decided to take in a double-header of horror themed goodness.
The Uninvited
I've never been a big fan of turning J-Horror films into soupy American remakes, but The Uninvited makes a strong case for me changing my mind. Emily Browning plays Anna, a girl who witnessed the death of her terminally ill mother in a boathouse explosion. Blaming herself, she tries to kill herself and ends up in a mental ward. Now released and back home with her father and sister, Anna has to put up with daddy's new woman, Rachel, who used to be her mother's nurse. As with all of the films of this type, Anna starts seeing visions of dead kids. Where are all these dead kids coming from anyway? They must buy 'em by the friggin' gross. She also begins seeing images of her dead mother, and all these visions seem to be warning her about Rachel. Is Rachel who she claims to be? And why do the people in Anna's life seem to keep dying all of a sudden?
The best part about The Uninvited is that it's fairly straight forward. There's no real mystery here. It's pretty obvious what's going on for the most part. The visions Anna sees aren't particularly gruesome, nor do I find them to be essential to the plot. I think the linear nature of the script only makes the big reveal all the more interesting. Elizabeth Banks does her best impersonation of Rebecca Demornay in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. And David Straitharn does his usual bang up job in what is really a pretty blah role. There's even some nice eye candy in the form of Arielle Kebbel(from the unfortunate Soul Plane and John Tucker Must Die), who never met a pair of low cut shorts that she didn't like. Emily Browning continues her trend of being extremely stiff and unemotional, but somehow it works here for the type of character she plays.
A solid suspense story with an interesting twist. Don't go in expecting anything too gorey and scary, though.
6/10
Coraline
First: BOOOOOOOO to Hoffman Center for not having this in 3-D. I asked the ticket taker about it and he looked at me like I had a nipple on the tip of my nose. Then again he was pretty old and probably had no idea what that new fangled 3-D stuff was.
Coraline is the brainchild of my favorite author, Neil Gaiman, and is the story of 11-year old Coraline Jones. She and her inattentive parents move into a new apartment building populated by an assortment of eccentric tenants. Bored, Coraline manages across a little door and one night goes through it. There she discovers another world which closely resembles her own. She meets her Other Mother and Other Father, who give her the attention and love she craves. Everything is as she wishes it would be in the real world. Coraline makes repeated trips to this Other world, until she discovers that her Other Mother is not all she claimed to be, and is hoping to trap Coraline in Otherworld forever.
Coraline is a beautiful film, done entirely with stop-motion animation similar to The Nightmare Before Christmas, which makes sense since it was directed by Henry Selick who made that picture as well. I daresay that the animation is what kept me most interested in this. Neil Gaiman is a master at doing stories about parallel worlds right in front of our faces, but it took me awhile to truly get invested in this story. It's not bad, but the non-Other world stuff feels very much like typical children's book fodder. But in Otherworld, Gaiman's creative genius really takes hold, as he comes up with all types of quirky and some downright scary characters and adventures for Coraline.
I think that might be part of my problem with the film, too, in that it might be too kiddie for adults but too scary for small kids. There was a little kid sitting behind me in the theater and I could hear him say to his Dad, "This is the scariest one I evah saw", which I'm assuming is not in reference to the horrible movie theater pretzel bites(although it would fit!). For me, I could've used a little more Gaiman inventiveness and a bit less of the kiddie stuff. Now if only they'd make a big-screen version of Gaiman's Neverwhere.
6/10
