CON: Shutter

I almost feel bad for Rachael Taylor (the Australian scientist chick from TRANSFORMERS) and James Kyson Lee (Ando from Heroes), who showed up to promote their film SHUTTER at WonderCon, only to be greeted with the laughter of an impatient audience eager to observe the X-FILES 2 panel immediately following. The reason I say “almost”, though, is because SHUTTER looks ridiculously bad, and the actors have nobody to blame but themselves for agreeing to work on something with such a dreadful script.

Trailer – Nothing new; just the same trailer that was released a while ago. You can check it out HERE. Or better yet, don’t.

Clip 1 – James Kyson Lee’s character is revealed to have photoshopped images to make them look like “spirit photography” (i.e. ghosts appearing in photos), and upon being questioned by Rachael Taylor, responds that real photos are hard to come by. He then proceeds to take her to a room absolutely covered in genuine “spirit photography”. Wait, what?

Clip 2 – A creepy girl hums and puts her hand on Joshua Jackson’s shoulder. He thinks she’s his girlfriend. Then his girlfriend calls and says she’s not gonna be at his place until later. Dun dun dunnn! He looks at the girl who was humming and it turns out she’s actually a cliché ghost girl with something weird squirming in her eye. He screams, the girlfriend drops the phone, runs over to his place, and finds him sitting with his back turned. She walks up to him, and boo! He leaps at her and the clip ends! Terrifying!

• People cheered when the studio representatives took down the SHUTTER poster. Hilarious.
• The cast had to work with an interpreter, as the director spoke almost no English.
• According to James Kyson Lee, “Ghosts don’t have to do anything to be scary.” I think we can take that as a guarantee SHUTTER will be filled with excitement.
• After people began sniggering at the clips for the film, a semi-embarrassed Rachael Taylor asked, “Why are you guys laughing?” I guess she wasn’t watching.

Another unoriginal Hollywood horror remake from Asian cinema featuring mysterious ghost women with long black hair? Oh boy, sign me up.