Dark Water

It'll scare you to sleep!

Here's the story (and if you've seen Ring Two, please skip this paragraph.): A lady and her daughter move into a pretty shitty apartment complex. The lady, Dahlia (quite an unfortunate name), has separated with her husband and they're now having custody issues. But that's not important. Her daughter, Ceci, is a stupid little bitch who likes to steal backpacks and get into random elevators. It's constantly raining and their apartment is a piece of shit with leaks all over the roof. Strange things happen as they hear noises coming from the floor above them and their water starts changing color. When the faucets spew out hair, you'd think these people would move. Or at least file a complaint to an authority higher than the foreign super. Instead of going on an exploration of the flooded apartment upstairs.

But hey. I guess logic is different to certain people.

The original Japanese version of the film was directed by Hideo Nakata. He also directed both Japanese and English versions of Ring Two. So. Why wasn't he asked to direct the American Dark Water? And why did Ring Two, which came out months before Dark Water in the U.S., stray so much from the Japanese Ring Two story and swerve into an odd tale about a mother, her son, and vengeful puddles?

My, but revenge is sweet.

Though, if these assumptions are incorrect, I'd like to know.

Either way, the new director of the movie, Walter Salles (known best for The Motorcycle Diaries), doesn't show the best skill for frightening an audience. As Hitchcock said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." He wouldn't set up the scare for very long and the scare itself was weak. Towards the end, I nearly decided to go to sleep.

The acting was fairly decent, but ... it's a horror flick. Who gives a fuck.

Dark Water spent too much time on relationships and dark pasts and not nearly enough on why the fuck this movie was supposed to scare us. If I want to see a movie about emotional issues and the drama that is life, why the fuck would I look towards the film with killer corpse children?

Overall: Plot holes galore; there's one particular background song that tries to burrow under your skin and feed on the warm flesh within; waiting around for scares eventually gets old; this movie will never end when you want it to, and it'll tease you, like, ten times; I'm still mad that I could've been watching Madagascar.

Fuck. Dark Water got served with one out of five snorts of coke.

Reviewed by Kathy

August 6, 2005