Movie Review: The Messengers
If it weren't for the fact that it isn't the least bit scary, The Messengers would be one heck of a good horror movie.
It's beautifully shot, and artfully directed by twin-brother Hong Kong hotshots Danny and Oxide Pang. It's well acted by a cast of familiar faces who are more talented by several degrees than the interchangeable puppets who shriek and wisecrack their way through most modern-day horror films. And the visual effects are creepy and credible.
But when there's literally nothing in the scary stuff that we haven't seen before, all that care and attention to detail still amounts to being all dressed up with no place to go.
It begins in promising enough fashion with a prologue in which a family is terrorized and wiped out by a brutal unseen something in their rambling old farmhouse. So when a new family moves into the same house some time later, anybody who's seen The Amityville Horror (among many others) has a pretty good idea of what's about to come down.
In this case, it's about to come down on the Solomons, a nice bunch of folks from Chicago who have escaped to the North Dakota farmlands to make a fresh start and recover from a grievous mistake by daughter Jess (Kristen Stewart) that nearly tore the family apart.
Paterfamilias Roy (Dylan McDermott) is gambling his brood's future on making it as a sunflower farmer. He has his hands full, with a wife (Penelope Ann Miller) who blames their daughter for the family's predicament and a toddler son who suffered a trauma back in Chicago that's left him mute.
Jess herself is guilt-ridden and homesick. And it doesn't help that Roy has moved them all into a place that looks like the Addams Family's summer home. It isn't long before evil spirits start showing up and shoving their weight around, first appearing to the little boy, and soon after to Jess herself -- but, since Jess has all those issues from her past, the grownups give her story zero credence.
Like every cinema kid in a similar position, from hot roddin' Steve McQueen in The Blob to little Heather O'Rourke in Poltergeist, she's on her own. This is well-trodden ground, to say the least.
And, all the spooky scenes are not so much frightening as exercises in nostalgia. The scene where Roy's attacked by huge crows is truncated and a lot less frightening than any number of moments in Hitchcock's The Birds. The unfocused glimpses of things flitting past the windows or through the tall crops were a lot more effective in Signs. The spooks skittering in the background of the house and climbing the walls are direct cribs from Japanese fright flicks like The Grudge and Pulse. And the denouement is a depressingly familiar rehash of '50s horror comics and any number of haunted house flicks.
All the acting is solid and engaging, with Stewart turning in a star-quality performance and McDermott displaying considerably more personality than he ever did in his TV series "The Practice." John Corbett, who's best remembered as the free-spirit disk jockey in "Northern Exposure," walks away with most of his scenes as a suspiciously folksy and amiable hired hand.
But all the competent emoting goes to waste, and The Messengers simply doesn't deliver where it counts. If you haven't seen a horror film in the last 50 years or so, this would be a good primer on what the genre's been up since the Truman administration.
Stars:
Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, John Corbett
* 1/2 (on a scale of zero to four stars)
***
