Shutter (2008) Dir: Masayuki Ochiai
- Ridley Coote
- 10 hours ago
- 2 min read
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Sometimes, I like to watch a film from the often very random selection of mediocre-looking horror films on whatever streaming service I'm using at the time. In this instance, it was this 2008 supernatural horror, directed by Masayuki Ochiai, which was a remake of a 2004 Thai horror film of the same name, that admittedly holds a much higher score on Letterboxd. I didn't need this film to be good though, as long as it was at least watchable.
The film looked really tacky. That might even be a generous understatement. It was shot like a very shoddy straight-to-DVD or straight-to-television film. There were scenes that looked legitimately awful - as in, worse than a mediocre YouTuber could make. Nothing about this film looked remotely good. This was the kind of film that floats around on freeview channels after watershed and gets little-to-no viewership everytime.
The film wasn't even remotely scary, and, even worse, it dragged horrendously. It was such a lacklustre experience to have to sit through just ninety minutes of this horribly paced film. It felt like the worst and longest opening to 'Supernatural' ever. To that end, I'm not even sure the Winchesters' could have saved this dumpster fire. The story was repetitive, poorly written, and so painfully stretched out. The execution was just so shoddy in all departments.
Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor provide two unlikeable, dull, and utterly lifeless, protagonists that sleepwalk their way through the nonsensical story with very little quality. Their characters make so many dumb decisions, and the actors portraying them seemed incapable of making either one of them feel remotely believable. The only other names who were remotely memorable were Megumi Okina and David Denman, but neither of them for overly positive reasons.
Overall, I couldn't quite believe how poor this so-called horror turned out to be. The scariest thing about it was how boring it was. I wasn't expecting it to be exceptional, but to sit through something quite as horrendous as this was still a surprise. If there is one positive to take from this terrible film, it's that it made me want to watch the much preferred original, which this film tried and failed to rip-off.
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