Shutter: A horror film that could have been a lot more

I had high hopes for this film as it is part of the Netflix focus on spooky flicks that they do every year, obviously, for Halloween. The idea that ghosts can only appear in pictures and are haunting and following a few people is an interesting idea for a film but ultimately, it ended up being kind of blasé.

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I'm always a little apprehensive when a film boasts that such and such person produced a film because this is completely different than if someone directed or wrote it. I don't know exactly how much influence a producer actually has on a film but from what I have read and seen they seem to be involved in more of a financial sense than a creative one. I could be wrong about that but there are plenty of bad films out there that touted a producer's name in the past.

It should surprise no one that this film is actually a USA remake of a Thai film and of course a lot of the people came out and said that the remake didn't do the original film justice. This is expected, critics have always said the same things about movies based on books as well. This movie is one of the lowest ranked movies on RT and I only found this out after watching it.

It turned a relatively good profit despite being originally released far before Halloween in a move that looked as though they were aiming for a summer release in cinemas and then a Spooktober release on DVD. That's just my guess anyway.

The story is that a newlywed family moves to Japan for a wonderful job opportunity for photographer husband Ben Shaw. His wife Jane (really inventive names guys) comes along to support her husband and they end up in a rather awesome Tokyo apartment that conveniently has some rather eerie lower floors.

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Strange things start happening in their apartment and just in life in general and this is especially noticed in the images of ghouls that start to appear in all of Ben's pictures that he is being paid to make. It actually is starting to ruin his career as well as he doesn't understand why his shots are being ruined by things that he can not see while he is there in person.

Through some trickery they end up encountering someone that of course knows that it is a spirit and the only way you can spot them when they are around you is if you use a polaroid camera so that you can see the images right away. I don't know why they didn't just use digital because that certainly existed in 2008... I guess they needed it to take longer for the image to show up or maybe the ghosts can only be captured on actual film.

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There are more things than just the way that this story is handled from a realism point of view that bothered me about it. For one thing, I hate it when they take foreign actors to another country and then try to pretend as though they can speak Japanese when they clearly can't. Rather than having a voice actor talk at Ben's back on his behalf with him occasionally nailing a few lines of Japanese dialogue how about just admit that there aren't really any white people that speak Japanese fluently? What is even more annoying is when people speak Japanese to Ben and he just nods in understanding and then responds in English.

Just do it in English guys! It's annoying to pretend about something that is clearly not the case.

Should I watch it?

I think I agree with the consensus online that this film shouldn't have been remade. It would have been better if they had just released the original film with subtitles. People refer to it as "another lame Asian horror remake" and I agree with this. I can't think of a single Asian film that has been remade in the US that was even close to as good as the original and this is another one of those. It doesn't matter to me who the producers are, this one didn't hold my interest and I simply found myself annoyed during most of it.

If the concept interests you, I would say seek out the Thai original. It doesn't have the budget of this one (which wasn't really even that much) but at least you skip all the irritating crap like pretending language barriers don't exist.