SYNOPSIS:
Joanna
is haunted by increasingly terrifying visions where she can
see and feel the brutal murder of a woman she's never met.
With her life spiraling out-of-control, she follows the relentless
nightmares to an eerie small town in Texas - a place where
secrets can't be buried, a spirit seeks vengeance and the
horrific murder from Joanna's visions may just be her own.
MOVIE REVIEW:
After watching this movie, the only thing we found creepy
was how Sarah Michelle Gellar seems to be starring in a slew
of movies associated with the supernatural. She who bears
“The Grudge”, she who hunts down monsters as Daphne
with “Scooby Doo”, and now, being haunted by “The
Return” of the past?
The
pretty New Yorker plays a troubled young girl who is haunted
by scary images of the past. No, she does not see dead people.
Instead, she keeps seeing and feeling a vicious murder of
a woman she does not even know. Determined to find out the
cause of this disturbing phenomenon, she travels to a small
town in Texas, where, well, as the open-ended synopsis will
tell you: a terrible truth awaits her.
Think
you have seen something like that somewhere before? Well,
unless you have never had the guts to sit through a Hollywood
horror movie, you would have.
The
86-minute picture moves at a snail’s pace to slowly
uncover the so-called mystery’s pieces – but instead
of feeling intrigued, we felt bored and irritated. Anyone
with a but of common sense could guess the movie’s next
revealing piece (come on, would anyone think that everything
is simply a coincidence?)
To
be fair, this Asif Kapadia-directed movie does look nice visually,
thanks to director of photography Roman Osin’s (Pride
and Prejudice) fine cinematography. The constant use of gloomy
colors and deep depth of fields to convey the movie’s
ominous and murky mood is worth commending. Also, composer
Dario Marianelli’s (V For Vendetta) dim score is worth
listening out for too.
Otherwise,
no matter how grave the supporting actors like Peter O’
Brien, Adam Scott and Sam Shepard try to look, or on a more
noteworthy mention, how hard Gellar tries to look terrified
and disturbed, this PG-rated (you should have seen that coming
when the flick isn’t slapped with a NC-16 or M18 rating)
horror movie does not offer much in terms of thrills and scares.
SPECIAL
FEATURES:
This Code 3 DVD contains a fair bit of bonus features, but
with a movie this dull, we didn’t feel very compelled
to think that the features were going to be any more interesting.
There
is a nine-minute “Making-Of”
where the cast and crew talks about how the concept of the
movie came about. Just by listening to their deeply intellectual
talk about how things in life come one full circle, you wouldn’t
believe that the actual movie would be such a weary watch.
Then
there are five “Deleted Scenes” which,
well, would have made the movie ten minutes longer if they
were not cut and left on the editing room floor.
The
five-minute “Alternate Ending”
isn’t particularly exciting either. We just wondered
why the filmmakers bothered to waste time and resources shooting
both sequences in the first place.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The
disc’s visual transfer makes Osin’s depressingly
overcast cinematography look good on screen, while the audio
track is Dolby Digital 5.1 English.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING:
Review
by John Li
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