Okay. Let's face facts. The first is that this is a horror movie
that scared the piss out of me. The second is that it borrows heavily
from Hitchcock movies. The third is that this is being written about
one-and-a-half months after I saw it. But I remember enough to be able
to at least write a recommendation, and that is that it was a scary movie.
This doesn't negate the fact that the first, say, half-hour to the first
hour of the movie doesn't really seem to have anything much to do with the
actual main story of the movie. This is bad. All it does is provide us
with some scares and builds up the paranoia of Michelle Pfeiffer's character.
Now, I'll admit, her paranoia is a very important aspect of this movie and
the jumps and scares that it provides, but the least they could have done
was link it more to the main story than do a variation on Hitchcock's Rear
Window.
Regardless, the movie does scare. That much is true. Lotsa jumps, lotsa
tense moments where you can hear your heart beat in your ears. Oh, and you'll
probably curse yourself for jumping as often as you will. Let's face it,
in any horror movie these days the scares are predictable, and it's more-or-
less the same with this one. That's not saying that it's a bad movie. It's
a great movie, and the scares are quite well-crafted, but they're also a
bit predictable. But at the least shock-value isn't what this movie is about.
It's not about the amount of blood that's spilt or the amount of decaying
corpses that are roaming about. Rather, the scares are crafted to be actually
scary. Now, ain't that something?
The story? Well... that's something else to explain. I don't like to give
anything away, but suffice it to say that it stars Harrison Ford and Michelle
Pfeiffer as husband and wife. Pfeiffer thinks their new neighbour just murdered
his wife (pointless story point I was referring to earlier), and eventually
she starts to believe that their house is haunted by some sort of spectre.
I won't go further into it. Likely you know the rest, and if you don't then
you'll want to kill me to spoiling the rest for you. It's a good movie, though,
well worth seeing if you enjoy the movies of the scary persuasion.
Just don't expect to sleep with the lights off anytime soon afterwards.