The Ring 2: based on previous film and novel work by Koji Suzuki and Hiroshi Takahashi, written by Ehren Kruger; directed by Hideo Nakata; starring Naomi Watts (Rachel), David Dorfman (Aidan) and Simon Baker (Max Rourke) (2005): Here we go again. The homicidal ghost from The Ring continues to kill people in the year 2005 who are still using VCRs. Reporter Naomi Watts still has a lot of time to investigate the ghost's origins, not all of which were discovered in The Ring.
Hideo Nakata, director of the original Japanese Ringu, brings a certain amount of visual flair to certain scenes. Still, interminable exposition and a ghost with no real limits makes for dull viewing for long stretches. David Dorfman, reprising his role as Watts' vaguely psychic son, does a good job. Much of Simon Baker's role appears to have been left on the cutting-room floor. No wonder he headed to TV to become The Mentalist! Not recommended.
Warm Bodies: adapted and directed by Jonathan Levine from the novel by Isaac Marion; starring Nicholas Hoult (R), Teresa Palmer (Julie), Analeigh Tipton (Nora), Rob Corddry (M) and John Malcovich (Grigio) (2013): From the Forbidden Planet school of extremely loose Shakespearean film adaptations comes Warm Bodies, in which Romeo is a zombie whose sudden love for Julie/Juliet causes him to gradually turn back into a human again.
Droll bits early and late comes mostly from zombie R's narration. The middle gets swamped by Young Adult romance. Chaste Young Adult Romance. He's still a zombie, and only vampire movies explicitly sanction teen-aged necrophilia as an admirable lifestyle. Sort of enjoyable, though the CGI on the really-bad 'skeletal' zombies is completely awful and unconvincing. Lightly recommended.
13 Eerie: written by Christian Piers Betley; directed by Lowell Dean; starring Katharine Isabelle (Megan), Michael Shanks (Tomkins) and Brendan Fehr (Daniel) (2013): They made this Canadian horror movie for $3 million. In Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan! The low budget and filming location are the most interesting things about this warmed-over bit of zombie nonsense.
Six forensics students, their professor, and an unfunny comic-relief Dogsbody head to a secluded island for their final field exam. They take an hour in a boat and some time in a converted school bus to get there, seems pretty odd later when they're all standing by a highway. Apparently, it's only an island on one side. Various zany experiments were conducted on convicts. Then the government left everything, including the undead convicts and the undead chemical barrels that made them undead, behind. And some other stuff. The zombies look like Peter Jackson orcs. Not recommended.
The Ring: based on the novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki and the Japanese film of the same name by Hiroshi Takahashi, adapted by Ehren Kruger; directed by Gore Verbinski; starring Naomi Watts (Rachel), Martin Henderson (Noah), David Dorfman (David), Brian Cox (Richard Morgan), jane Alexander (Dr. Grasnik), Lindsay Frost (Ruth) and Shannon Cochran (Anna Morgan) (2002): AKA, the remake that launched a thousand Hollywood remakes of Asian horror movies. If you watch a short film on a videotape, you die seven days later!
Some judicious editing might have occluded the film's central problem, which is that beneath its endless investigation and exposition of the 'cause' of the central haunting, nothing really makes any sense. To cite one spoiler-free example, much of the plot hinges on somebody building something on top of something else in a way never before seen on Earth so as to supply one of the movie's 'A-ha!' moments.
To cite another, Naomi Watts, as the film's protagonist, launches an investigation of why certain life-threatening eerie things are happening because...um, she's a reporter? Given that the supernatural is confirmed roughly 20 minutes into the movie, Watts might be expected to find out if there's a way to stop a ghost. Or she could investigate the ghost's origins because she's got nothing better to do for the next week. At the end of the week, the ghost will kill her. So what the Hell, let's investigate the ghost's origins. Because if there's one thing we've learned from horror movies, it's that knowing the origin of a homicidal supernatural being always allows one to defeat said being.
Gore Verbinski's direction occasionally produces interesting imagery, much of it from the music-video school of the Prettily Photographed Surreal. Watts is fine in the lead role. As is revoltingly standard in Hollywood movies of all shapes and sizes, her status as a devoted career woman makes her morally suspect, and perhaps may even be thematically linked to her 'punishment' by supernatural forces.
And the laborious connecting-the-dots to explain everything about the spooky videotape (which still isn't nearly as spooky as Un Chien Andalou, any number of David Lynch sequences, or several dozen music videos I can think of) is an exercise in wasted energy. They've got a homicidal ghost, and the filmmakers seem to be more worried about whether it's realistic for said ghost to be able to make a videotape. Oh, brother. Not recommended.
Dream House: written by David Loucka; directed by Jim Sheridan; starring Daniel Craig (Will Atenton), Rachel Weisz (Libby), Naomi Watts (Ann Patterson), and Elias Koteas (Boyce) (2011): A talented director (Sheridan directed Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot) and a solid cast result in a major stinker. Studio tampering fingerprints this production, though I'm not sure how much better the film would have been without interference. The grim lifelessness of many of the scenes doesn't seem to have anything to do with the whims of focus groups.
Daniel Craig quits his job and moves his family (a wife and two daughters) into a dream house in a small town. He's going to write a novel. But a family was murdered in that house, a fact the real-estate broker didn't tell Craig. The father apparently killed the mother and two girls but got shot in the head by the wife in the process, a head wound that put the father into a mental asylum for five years. But now the father's out, never convicted of the crime. And a mysterious watcher lurks outside the windows at night, scaring Craig's wife (Weisz) and children. A divorced neighbour (Watts) seems to know more than she's telling.
And then, 45 minutes in, the movie implodes with a twist that really needed a lot more build-up. The movie wanders off into the woods, bumping into trees. There's a half-hearted attempt at another twist in the final scene, though the scene is ambiguous enough to explain away as just another plot development and not another reversal.
You can at least add Dream House to that long list of films in which fire is only dangerous if it actually touches you, even when it surrounds you. These movies exist in a universe in which air doesn't transmit heat, and what a marvelous universe that would be.
Craig acts a lot like late-career Harrison Ford here, joyless and withdrawn. He looks like he's ready for a brawl with the key grip at any second. Watts's character seems to have had all her character-development scenes edited out of the movie: she's all plot device. Weisz is fine in a thankless role as a loving yet sexy wife. Sheridan pretty much disowned this film, and I can see why -- it's not even bad in an enjoyable way. It induces 80% boredom and 20% rage. Avoid! Not recommended.
