Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here, with a quick, frustrated note about this week's horror offering, THE UNINVITED. (I'm pretty sure we've had a horror movie per week for the month of January.) Where to begin. When you can guess a horror film's--any film's--big twist in the first 10 minutes, you are pretty much guaranteed a tedious time at the movies. When you have a great deal of affection for the original version of a movie you're about to watch (in this case, the film was the Korean offering A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, the largest-grossing film in Korean history), tedium transforms into resentment. But when you watch the filmmakers--the youthful UK team Charles and Thomas Guard, a.k.a. The Guard Brothers--eviscerate all of the great plot devices and visual genius of that original film, then you just get pissed. So that's me in a nutshell watching THE UNINVITED, the story of a crazy teenager, released from a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt months earlier brought on by her mother's untimely death. When young Anna (Australian actress Emily Browning from LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS returns to her family's Maine home, things have changed. The nurse (Elizabeth Banks, in one of her least persuasive performances) brought in to take care of Anna's sickly mother is now dad David Strathairn's new girlfriend. Some things haven't changed: Anna's hot sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), is still prancing around the house is skimpy outfits being a brat, but her family seems unusually forgiving of her behavior. So here's the first and deepest problem with THE UNINVITED--we know right from the outset that Anna isn't really cured of whatever was bothering her months earlier that got her thrown in the nut house. She has visions of her dead mother's corpse, as well as the dead faces of others, so we know we can't really trust these frightening images that are meant to scare her and us. The film uses the usual musical punctuation to make us jump at the loud noise, but the scares aren't really genuine. Eventually they wore off for me because I realized early on that we can't trust anything Anna sees, hears or even reads. And we're seeing things through her eyes most of the time, so we always know that whatever perceived threat to her probably isn't genuine, including times when she thinks her stepmother is out to kill her and Alex to have dear old dad all to herself. THE UNINVITED hops back and forth from horror film to murder mystery, without either genre being particularly interesting. Browning is a strong enough actress to keep us with her for most of the film, but the script is so staggeringly weak that I really began to hate her character. Strathairn and Banks certainly add some much-needed class to the proceedings, but even they aren't putting forth their best effort...and they don't do much to hide it. As far as the style of the film, there is none. I would have settled for a gimmick, some weird and wild camera movements, fish-eye lens, something. But no, the film is standard-issue point and shoot horror stuff. THE UNINVITED isn't the worst film I've seen all year so far; it's not even the worst horror film of January 2009. But boy is it dull and unmotivated. -- Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
