If you aren’t aware of the plot, it’s a late, experimental variation on noir, about 2 grifters in the Hustler-Older Woman game. For reasons that seem to make no amount of sense, real life con-artists/lovers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez posed as brother and sister during their scams, their schemes allowing the 200-lb. Beck to accompany Hernandez and their target on ‘dates’ as a chaperone up to and after the ‘wedding’.

It’s an odd film, with primitive camera movements, clumsy direction and stilted dialogue. Conversation and character interaction seem to be second-thought here — almost every line is exposition. describing things that are going on off-screen.

The big question is whether the director, Leonard Kastle intended that the performers ‘externalize’ the performances the way they did. In 1969, it might have been seen as revolutionary, but in 2010 it just seems mannered in an unproductive way. If he had done 10 more films like this, it might have amounted to an interesting style, like a Pinter play or Mamet film. But this was Kastle’s only screen credit and this Kastle can’t boast any relation to the other Castle of B-movie fame.

The story of Beck and Hernandez has been remade twice as ‘Deep Crimson‘ (1996) and ‘Lonely Hearts (2006).

Recommended for fans of David Lynch and John Cassavettes

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Terry Gilliam attempted to bring ‘Watchmen’ to life twice, once in 1989 and a decade later, in 1999. He gave up because he felt that the story couldn’t be adequately covered in 2 hours’ time and that the material might be better dealt with as a miniseries, Though there is no Gilliam ‘Watchmen’, I credit ‘Watchmen’ and it’s alternate-apocalyptic 1985 for the rich visual landscape of thr film that Gilliam went on to produce in the mid-’90′s, ’12 Monkeys’ (1995).

Moore’s ambivalent heroes were a sea-change for comic book industry back in 1985, but Zack Snyder’s 2009 film stops far, far short of of Moore’s moral revisionism and even further from the Watchmen send-up that was Brad Bird’s ‘The Incredibles‘ (2004).

Anyone attempting to translate Moore’s 12-issue, 264 page graphic novel — a would-be 4-1/2 hours in screenplay-time — into filmed entertainment had a daunting enterprise ahead of them.

Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ fails as an adaptation because the writers failed to adequately adapt the prosaic storyline to suit the 2-hour commercial format. The David Hayter/Alex Tse screenplay, hews too close to the dramatic beats of the original novel. At full length, those beats have their place because they furnish Moore’s 8 protagonists with engaging backstories, however, even at 166 minutes, the 264 page version of the thing fails to be fully satisfied.My other problem with the movie — besides the length — was the writers’ decision to comp so closely to the comic books’ dialogue and Snyder’s tolerance for some very average performances. I often felt as though the actors were reading their lines off of a teleprompter rather than inhabiting their characters. That and 2009 is not 1986 — people like Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca have neither standing or relevance, 23 years later after Chrysler has been bought, sold and is in the ditch once again. I’m certain that 90% of the cherished 16-24 viewing audience drew a complete blank the movie’s reference to Iacoccoca.

As a fanboy, I generally like to see my favorite stories faithfully reproduced for the screen. However, as an audience member, I saw too many rich characters crowding the screen, only to see their potential wasted. Each and every one of Moore’s Minutemen team were not only superheroes, but also tragic figures, trapped in their own peculiar hells. Silk Spctre (Sally Jupiter) is a 2nd-generation hero, having inherited her title from her mother, Sally Juspeczyk. Similarly, Nite Owl aka Daniel Dreiberg wears the costume of a legendary Silver Age hero. But the most formidable dysfunctions are to be found in the older heroes — Dr. Manhattan, the original Silk Spectre, Ozymandias and the Comedian because their idealism and nostallgia poison their daily lives.

Like Oliver North, The Comedian sees himself as a formidable patriot, despite the fact that his marching orders came from questionable quarters. When the one super-powered being, Jon Osterman, transmigrates into Doctor Manhattan, he leaves his humanity behind.

From my writerly perspective, Watchmen ought to have been Rohrshach’s picture — as with ‘Taxi Driver’, we ought to have had a good long taste of Rohrshach’s daily, hard-luck P.O.V., down to stealing Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl’s beans. The rising action of the Comedian’s death should have allowed Rohrshach to recount his troubled relationship with the man, but deciding to investigate the matter nonetheless.

There was no reason for this movie to run almost 3 hours. If you’ve got 246 pages of comic book script to turn into a movie and only 120 minutes to tell the story, then you’re going to have to cut some pages. Sometimes this happened, but we lost lots of important character development along the way. This is especially tragic because Watchmen is a character-driven piece. Like ‘Rosebud’ in ‘Citizen Kane’ we had an opportunity to see Jon Osterman’s childhood obsession with watches, but that didn’t play out in this film, even though it showed up on ‘Heroes’ (and then, was wasted).

I’m sure that the Snyder’s choices will justify themselves upon the 2nd and 3rd viewing, but the name of the game in moving works of literature into film is adaptation. Though I’m a huge fan of Carla Gugino, they ought to have diminished her role more and given Malin Akerman more space to explore being a 2nd-generation hero and Dr. Manhattan’s forgotten love interest, precisely because the Osterman/Janey Slater subplot doesn’t pay off as well as it does in the book.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Wolverine is by far one of the more interesting of the first-generation X-Men. He’s cranky; he carries his own moral code around like an invisible cloud often circumventing plans and strategies to do what he believes is right; he’s confident, and he’s practically indestructible. In short, Wolverine is the perfect anti-hero. Unfortunately, ‘Origins’ does little to dig under those surface qualities to show us just how he actually got to be the way he is.

Beginning in 1845 in rural Canada, ‘Origins’ introduces a sibling relationship between Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) and the years of soldiering the two brothers do between the death of their real, shared father and the Vietnam war are told in a visually artful way that tells us next to nothing about their characters. It isn’t until this last war, it seems, when Wolverine has had enough of his brother’s blood lust.

The bulk of the film centers quite rightly on how Wolverine acquired the adamantium, courtesy Col. William Stryker (Danny Houston here; Brian Cox in ‘X2?), adhering to his skeleton and how he lost his memories of a more than 100-year lifespan. The conflict between the human and the animal is expressly spoken of in the story but never really conveyed; it is a foregone conclusion that Wolverine will take Stryker’s offer and that he will continue to struggle with the beast within himself. And therein lies the major problem with this film: Like ‘Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith’ because we know what comes after it the inherent drama of the origin is vastly diminished.

Visually stylish and packed with both action and fight sequences, director Gavin Hood could have cut about 20 minutes in the second act without sacrificing the intricate set-up of Stryker’s betrayal. Too, Hood, on only his third film, makes a couple of rookie mistakes attempting to show us too much in some places and not allowing for enough breathing room in others; Wolverine’s embarrassment at the accidents caused by his brand new adamantium claws is priceless and a too brief bit of humor in a film that otherwise takes itself with the utmost seriousness. And for those who pay attention to such details, it is worth noting that while he is never referred to in ‘Origins’ as Sabretooth it’s likely because producers wasted the character in the first film in the franchise by presenting him as a mute animal barely up to average intelligence which is a clear diversion from Schreiber’s portrayal.

Hugh Jackman shoulders the burden of Wolverine well, delivering with a consistency of performance that should satisfy most casual fans. Let’s just hope that the producers and keepers of the X-Men series are smart enough to make their next move ‘X-Men Origins: Storm’.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Granted that Abrams and his writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman add a little time travel quirk that creates an alternate reality for this new Trek, it does come off with a bit more verve than the original series had some 40 years ago. Both the writing and the SFX have improved, just as Desilu Studios never gave Roddenberry $75M to shoot a single episode.

The idea of a utopian, space-faring human civilization is bourne of a postwar optimism and late ’60′s ebullience that the War on Terror and our current financial debacle have put a fork in. If not for the success of the franchise in years past, nobody would posit a Federation of Planets based upon the United Nations because the latter has been such an overwhelming success.

I certainly don’t number myself among the Whedon-can-do-no-wrong zombies, but Firelfly seemed a better augur of things to come, should humans ever escape Earth’s gravity-well to inhabit the stars. But Paramount has rebooted Trek, keeping many of it’s societal constraints intact, but alterting the biographies of it’s chief protagonists, James Tiberius Kirk

SPOILER WARNING: In this new 2009 film the vengeful Romulan, Nero has altered various timelines in such a way that Kirk both gtows up in single-parent households. Like Like Luke Skywalker before him, Kirk is suddenly an orphan from some backward province. Instead of the son of a decorated officer, he is military orphan with an impetuous streak. He is discovered by one Capt. Christopher Pike and joins Starfleet. Thus is the new new Trek launched.

Given the time-travel abuses that committed by science-fiction, it was probably just a matter of time before Paramount spawned an alternate Trek-verse. This Trek is more action oriented and plagued by coincidences. Like Skywalker, this Kirk finds himself on planet Hoth challenged by Arctic monsters before — surprise! –he comes into contact with the older Spock from the original Trek timeline.

Surely, this alternate-timeline is the stuff of fanboy heaven, creating new possibilities for retelling of the series’ original 79 episodes, but I’m not holding my breath. Trek ’66 was a product of its time as much as Farscape was a product of the late ’90′s.

As Corinthians 13, chapters 11 and 12 says, ” When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child…, but when I became an adult, I gave up childish things.” And that is precisely the head-space Trek occupies for me these days. As a writer, I find it both absurd and arbitrary that Starfleet Officers aren’t allowed to disagree with one another, but Abrahms, Kurzman and Orci seem to be willing to play fast and loose with other Roddenberry Rules ¹.

That said, Chris Pine does a serviceble job as Kirk, not by imitating William Shatner, but by trying to inject some naturalism into the role, emoting rather than projecting, allowing Kirk to be a young, inexperienced captain, ratter than the cocksure swaggart of the old show. Though he can’t separate his ring and middle fingers, Sylar does a serviceable job as young Spock. Though I may not become an adherent of this re-imagined franchise, it will be interesting to watch it develop in the coming years.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.

While this installment of Batman seems to be the most successful commercial film since James Cameron’s ‘Titanic‘, you’d think that such a movie would have to have a simple storyline to keep selling tickets at such a rapid pace, week after week. Not so, here.

Despite the relatively simple two-villain interplay and some romantic conflict lifted from a drugstore novel, TDK takes what should be a simple, 90-minute flick and turns it into an angsty and operatic 150-minute movie that will challenge your kidneys to make it to the end-credits.

What Nolan, his co-writer and brother, Christopher and David Goyer attempt to do with that extra hour is create a dramatically plausible Batman, capable of transcendin multple genres at once — the Historical Allegory, the science-fiction flick, the comic book flick and the Lifetime movie-of-the-Week, where the Rachel Dawes character is concerned.. Promotional materials for the movie indication Nolan’s interest in creating a film more ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ than Spider-Man in it’s sensibility.

One of the things that Anne-the-filmmaker, my Cineblog partner here complained about was the lack of focus that many of the shots seemed to have. That could be easily chalked-up to the oversized IMAX film-format that Nolan and chose to shoot much of the movie on — a variation on 70mm film-stock that runs at roughly 3x the conventional frame-rate, roughly 60 frames-per-second.

The problem for non-IMAX theaters is that the prints for conventional theaters are shrunk-down and de-resed for the 35mm/24fps resolution of conventional theaters, resulting in a smaller, fuzzier picture.

Story problems begin when they try to fuse Batman’s street-level crime-drama with the international, high-finance aspects, The Joker’s terrorist ambitions and the romantic ambitions of Bruce Wayne’s double-antagonist, Gotham’s new District Attorney, Harvey Dent. Like the IMAX film, the whole thing just doesn’t scale well.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the first 15 minutes are thrilling — some unidentified criminals execute a well coordinated heist of a mob bank. As, in the best caper flics, it’s a delight to watch a bunch of characters execute a well-planned heist. But once Nolan finishes that sequence, the whole affair proceeds to become another two or three movies, piled into the same movie screen. For another 140 minutes.

Bruce Wayne is Batman; we know that from Batman Begins. Rachel Dawes, Wayne’s childhood sweetheart in the prior movie — Katie Holmes , there, reprised here by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And then there’s ADA Harvey Dent, competing for Dawes’ affections and that of Gotham’s chief prosecutor. Finally, there’s The Joker, the movie most easily identifiable villain.

Whether or not it was Nolan’s intention to comment upon Human Civilization after 9-11, it’s become apparent that Batman has become too good at his job. Violent crime in Gotham has apparently plummeted some 90%, because Batman has successfully detected and prosecuted all criminal enterprises in Gotham since the end of the first movie. He’s so successful that the police department routinely broadcasts the Bat-signal, simply to discourage criminal activity.

Madman that he is, The Joker sees this detente as a business opportunity. Now that organized crime is hunkered-down around its boardroom tables, The Joker elects to set off random explosions and make off with the criminals’ dirty money.

The Joker describes himself as an agent of chaos. Throughout the film, he repeatedly raises the bar, first by offering a cash reward for Batman’s identity and then, inexplicably, a bounty on a Wayne Corporation employee who may have a line on Batman’s identity

So what’s to like here? More than two and a half hours of bladder-challenging Batman, if that’s your cup of tea. Heeth Ledger’s last performance and Aaron Eckhart’s best ever. The effects might get an Oscar, if only because the media has gushed about the film all summer. Me. I’m waiting for Aranofsky to direct a redacted version of the ‘Hush‘ storyline.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

As is the case with many of these latter-day remakes, the movie is populated by television actors cut loose from their day-jobs:The 2005 remake features Tom Welling (“Smallville”) and Maggie Grace (“Lost”), wasting Selma Blair (‘Hellboy’) in the de-emphasized role of Stevie Wayne, the lighthouse owner and disc jockey. This remake ‘updates’ the story with references to ‘Girls Gone Wild’ and other PG-13 mall-scares like Darkness Falls. Like ‘Alien (1979) the original ‘Fog’ was a decidedly R-rated with a strong female lead, aimed at an adult audience.

The original was a work of passion, as Carpenter famously re-shot a third of the original film after principle photography had wrapped, adding the John Houseman prologue to decisively frame the picture as a ghost-story. The remake was greenlit on an incomplete, 18 page draft.

Both movies take place in a picturesque seaside community — Antonio Bay, California in the original, Antonio Island, Oregon in the emake — a town founded 100 years ago, about to celebrate its centennial with parades, ticker-tape parades and a statue dedicated to its founders. But as with much of the American frontier, the community of Antonio Bay was initiated with a blood-debt that most of its current residents are unaware of.

Selma Blair’s Stevie Wayne is under-written, compared to Adrienne Barbeau’s original movie. In Carpenter’s film there is a ‘Rear Window‘ dynamic operating between Barbeau’s character and several other characters that falls flat in the remake. Whether it’s the weakness of Blair’s acting chops or Welling’s incipient stardom, the emphasis of this remake has shifted from the Barbeau character to Welling’s Nick Castle, who was little more than a supporting role in the original.

Carpenter also manages pacing better than Wainwright:The difference between the two movies occurs precisely in the gap between hearing and seeing. The remake places an emphasis on visual spectacles — fires, explosions and glass attaacks — whereas Carpenter allows characters to report violent things that have occued offscreen, creating tension without having to stage gory events until absolutely necessary.

Besides the generational shift, the remake misses the gravitas brought to the original by the participation of the mother-daughter team of and Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis. Leigh is known, of course, for her iconic roles– not only as Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho‘ (1960) but also Susie Vargas in Orson Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil‘ (1958) . By 1980, Jamie Lee had become a star as the result of Carpenter’s ‘Halloween‘ (1978), but actors like John Houseman and Hal Holbrook brought a remarkable pedigree to the work of the still-young filmmaker. The remake has no strong veteran players to anchor the story.

Gone is the feminist subtext, and Rob Bottin’s superior make-up and practical effects, replaced by CGI. But Graeme Revelle score is an effective, interesting addition underserved by Cooper Layne’s finished script.

Like many of the J-horror remakes, this movie seems to want to place an emphasis on electronic gadgetry to ornament the story — camcorders, televisions and cell-phones which naturally go on the fritz as a result of proximate ghosts, but the gadgetry is a nod rather than a plot-device.

‘The Fog’ (1980):Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
‘The Fog’ (2005):Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

‘Shutter’ plays like ‘Ring 2′ ought to have. Back in 2005, I had hoped that the production team at DreamWorks would have done the smart thing and either followed the Japanese sequel or done the metatextual thing and paid homage to their source material by sending Rachel Keller East for a close-encounter with kwaidon — Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Shutter ’08 is good at explaining the mechanics of Asian horror, but little better than other American remakes. It may even be too late to resurrect American interest in the import subgenre.

The 2004 Thai original and American remake are almost identical, save for the fact that in the American version protagonists Ben and Jane are visiting Japan from the United States, whereas the original’s Tun and Jane are Bangkok locals. Ben-Tun is, in both cases, a photographer with a past. Thai-Jane is a student, while American-Jane is a schoolteacher. American-Jane and Ben are newlyweds, while Jane and Tun are presumably just dating.

It’s fairly clear that the original Thai Shutter of ’04 was inspired by the Japanese Ringu franchise — the Hideo Nakata film that gained popularity in Japan, then spun off into 2 sequels and a South Korean television series. Aside from the stringy-haired ghost, there’s a moment when an iconic, Sadako-like figure starts to rise from a darkroom sink.

Interestingly, it’s the original version of this viral ghost-story that raises the ante for Western audiences by tipping its hat to Chris Marker’s ‘La Jettée‘. Though it’s just a little didactic, there’s a good moment in the original film where student-Jane’s instructor explains that “photography does not reproduce reality. It depends on how the image is framed. What is revealed, [and] what is concealed. Your perspective is critical.”

The original film features more inventive camera work and better production design despite the re$ource$ the American version had going for it. Because their Shutter entered the field at the end of a wave of Asian tech-virus horror movies, Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom really are able to improve upon everybody else’s stories of haunted cell phones and watering holes: Spirit Photography has been a cult fascination throughout the world since the 19th c. What better ay to populate an Asian horror film than with a technology or phenomenon that Westerners might already be familiar with?

Moreover, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom borrow numerous Western ideas ideas about photography and it’s aesthetics as plot-points — specifically, the heretofore mentioned matters of framing and perspective. But this effort at staging and blocking doesn’t make it into Luke Dawson’s screenplay adaptation . Curiously, there’s a Larry Craig moment in the original that might have entertained American audiences but for some reason it didn’t make the American cut of the film.

One thing I have noticed about these movies, especially in the Thai original is the attention to shot composition. Here, more than most American movies, the original emphasizes shot composition because you’re constantly surveying the background for ghostly apparitions. Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom go one further than any of the directors that preceded them by paying homage to both Nakata and Stanley Kubrick in closing pursuit scene absent from Dawson’s adaptation.

Another nice invention by Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom is a sequence where Jane assembles her snapshots only to discover that they’re haunted by a zoetroped ghost in an image sequence. This is repeated in the American remake, but of course the pictures here are in color.

For all of the ‘Ringu’, ‘Grudge’, ‘Pulse’ and ‘One Missed Call’ rip-offs that have been projected onto American screens these past few years, the original ‘Shutter’ has the best ending, something that surprising and thoughtful, but aped in the American version. See it, but see the original.

Original Thai version Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Japanese-directed U.S. remake Rating: 2 out of 5 stars