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75Surprisingly effective supernatural tale in which there's more to fear from the living than the dead.
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63Shutter has the look and feel of a proper J-horror film. Tokyo is seen as a series of gloomy gun metal skies. And the acting is more subdued than in Hollywood horror movies.
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50If Shutter is any indication, the reputation of professional photographers is still on the wane. Not only are photographs creepy, the film suggests, but so are photographers.
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Seems like a technological regression.
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42The photography hook gives Shutter the potential to be a genuinely creepy ghosts-in-the-machine story like the original "Pulse," or better still, a horror twist on "Blowup." But one effective scene lit solely by a camera flash isn't enough to rescue this from the J-horror slushpile.
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40Genuine scares are few and far between, and the climactic explanation for the ghost's appearances comes as something less than a revelation.
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The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from "Psycho," and draws unease from Jane's disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie's most fascinating player.
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40A blandly cast and crafted remake of the same-titled 2004 Thai pic that itself emulated J-horror norms, which seemed a lot fresher back then.
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Fans of J-horror (for Japan, where the genre was born; its conventions have since spread to South Korea and Thailand) will find Shutter familiar; others may just doze.
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Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film--by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast--this plays more like a video copy of "The Ring" that's been so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.
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25Asian horror remakes are typically not screened for critics, and Shutter is no exception. The studios know what they have: watered-down, lifeless shells of motion pictures devoid of characters, drama, or anything remotely resembling horror.
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20The very Thai-specific charms that made the original Shutter such an unforeseen, unpredictable delight when I first saw it – and when I screened it again, last night – are almost entirely absent here, eclipsed by the annoying blonde highlights of Taylor, ex-Transformer babe and forever, as the Thai say, farang.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 19
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Mixed: 1 out of 19
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Negative: 12 out of 19
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JayH.44.5/10. Well enough made, good imagery, but it never once convinced me, and that is essential for this film. Watchable but not memorable.
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JacobS.2
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tug2