Shutter - Ombre dal passato

this movie was mostly boring,with no real scares.plus this genre(remakes of Japanese movies)is getting to be old hat,at least in my mind.i also didn't think the actors put forth a lot of effort.i will admit the ending was a bit creepy,but a horror movie with a creepy ending,does not a complete horror movie make.the rest of the movie was lifeless and bland.having interesting characters with more than one dimension always helps.too bad this movie didn't have them.the storyline isn't too deep,either.i won't say this is the most boring movie i have ever seen,or the worst.it's just that it does nothing to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack.for me,Shutter is a 4/10

This was a surprisingly good, old fashioned ghost story.

I haven't seen the original and I'm not a fanboy, so I didn't have any axes to grind going in. The cast is very good if somewhat underutilized, the photography and musical scoring are excellent, and there's a plot twist that caught me completely by surprise.

Watching the previews you'd think this was the one millionth Asian horror with a vengeful female spirit who has long black hair and dark circles under her eyes. There's more than that going on here.

And, without giving any plot points away, the final shot of the film is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Sure, this isn't the most original piece of work ever. It's part of a long tradition of ghost stories. But the makers had the sense to keep it to 85 minutes so it's over before you really begin to think how familiar some of the material is.

As mentioned else where, this is a remake and has been done before and we have all seen it at least a few times before. Yes they are absolutely right. But the amount of 1 star reviews is undeserving.

This film has the slow methodical pace of an Eastern film but (as usual) loses a lot of the atmosphere when transfered to Hollywood.

Yes it is a bit weird they take photos of EVERYTHING and the sting in the plots tail isn't really that venomous. But Joshua Jackson (aks Pacey from Dawson's) does OK and the leading lady is pretty and does solid work and I did have the hairs on my arms standing to attention a number of times and it did make me jump.

Nothing special but much preferable to having teeth pulled.

Take it as it is. A derivative, leaden, mind-numbingly simplified remake of a superior original. That's not to say that it's genuinely decent on its own merits if you've not already seen 2004's seminal Thai-horror "Shutter" that reignited that country's interest in producing slow burning, luxuriously made horror films. Interestingly, and perhaps even fittingly, the Hollywood machine that devours and regurgitates the recent slate of J-Horror films has turned its sights on "Shutter", which arguably finds its core roots in Japan's horror conventions in its vengeful, waifish ghost girl tormenting the living by manifesting through various electronic mediums. So what Masayuki Ochiai's adaptation essentially becomes is a carbon copy of copy.

American photographer Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) and his blonde schoolteacher bride Jane (Rachael Taylor) go straight from nuptials to a working honeymoon in Japan, natch, because America just isn't as scary to Americans as Asia is. Before heading off to Ben's lucrative assignment in Tokyo, the newly minted couple heads to a remote countryside inn when a brief accident derails Jane's constitution and compels her to seek out answers led by a phantasmal presence in photographs and a newly discovered knowledge of spirit photography.

Unremarkably, Luke Dawson's screenplay omits and appends details to its basic premise. The original uses the stark disassociation of city living to intensify the eeriness of isolation, and the idea that we never really see what we think we know. Dawson's script transplants the couple to a different country, ramping up the cultural alienation and exoticism of another culture. It's not dissimilar to what we've already seen in "The Grudge" remakes.

Even as Ochiai's direction is comparatively surefooted and patient with the camera choosing to hang on to a scene instead of ludicrously harping on jump-cuts and eyeball-rattling shots that bounce off the wall, the film feels unambitiously stale. "Shutter" goes through the motions of dourly checking off look-behind-you set pieces and reflections on windows. The plotting and performances are so apparent; you'd find yourself a couple of steps ahead of the film's central faux-mystery. While the bizarre symbiotic relationship audiences have with particularly mediocre remakes of Asian horror films should still live on after this, what remains most terrifying is how textbook simple and undemanding the film-making has become for films of its ilk.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to catch the 2004 Thai original before this American remake premiered at the annual Belgian Horror and Fantasy Festival. I didn't bother to see it when it initially got released because there already was an overload of Asian Ghost movies at that time and I really couldn't cope enduring another dull and scare-free imitation of "Ringu". After seeing the US remake I'm definitely interested in checking out the original sooner or later. The basic idea of restless spirits trying to communicate through photography is remotely original, but the elaboration (at least in this remake) remains somewhat tedious and predictable. Immediately after their marriage, Jane follows her photographer husband Ben to Tokyo where his friends arranged a splendid job for him. Jane, but soon after also Ben, suffers from visions of a deceased girl and all the pictures they make are ruined by ghostly images of this same girl. There's more than obviously a link between this girl and Ben's past days as a bachelor, but Jane only gradually learns the truth of what happened exactly. To my knowledge, this is the first and so far only Thai film to be remade by a Japanese director but with American funds and cast members. Talk about an international co-production! Masayuki Ochiai previously directed the incredibly atmospheric and uncanny hospital-horror film "Infection", so he definitely knows how to build up suspense and terror through suggestion. The main problem here is that the ghostly subject matter is too "soft" and doesn't lend itself to provide some genuine shock-moments. We've all seen too many (Asian) horror movies already in which white-faced spirits spontaneously appear & disappear again, and the mystery is always build up towards a point where the script can't possibly fulfill the audience's anticipations anymore. In "Shutter", you rather quickly figure out that Ben knows than he tells, so you can easily guess each and every plot twist far in advance. There are a very limited number of sets and exterior locations. Why didn't the film take advantage of the wondrous city of Tokyo, like for example "Lost in Translation" did? Rachael Taylor is certainly a promising actress with a lot of growing potential, so I hope she'll get offered a couple of better screenplays in the near future. Thus far, she only has horror rubbish like "See No Evil" and "Man-Thing" on her repertoire and those things won't get her noticed. Neither will "Shutter", for that matter.