After the Brothers Pang, Oxide and Danny, floored the whole of horror with their 2002 feature, The Eye, much anticipation followed as the countdown began for Hollywood to green light a project for the duo. Yet, admittedly, half of the anxiety involved in such a scenario is hypothesizing upon how well the filmmaking imports will fair in the United States. Will a multimillion-dollar budget permit an epic to finally manifest itself or will Tinsel Town send the novice party back home–bruised, beaten and all-but-already forgotten? After The Messengers, the only thing which amazes more than the fact that the Pangs stuck around for the premier is the number of other notable names involved in the proceedings who didn’t have their titles rescinded from the credits.
Immediately following The Eye, Pavlovian drool appeared at the mere mention of the prospect of a new project, either foreign or domestic, from the two visionaries. However, dehydration threatened to wrinkle more than one fan once it was announced that Sam Raimi’s fledgling production company was backing the young directors, who had chosen to work from a story by Todd Farmer, the pen responsible for miraculously instilling a handful of thought-provoking ideas in the tenth chapter of one of the longest and, as a consequence–most decrepit–franchises in horror history, Friday the 13th.. Unfortunately, the East-West transitional curse which has plagued more than one horror director rears its ugly head once again as, no doubt, the plight of too many cooks in the kitchen further exacerbates matters.
I am convinced that the only manner in which you can take sheer and utter brilliance and it refuse, even on its worst day, to display even a hint of its potential is to place it alongside other geniuses in a closely confined area. How else do you go from the modern-day Cassandra complex made terrifyingly real in The Eye to The Messengers, the bastard child of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror, cacophonously accentuated by sunflowers (yes, sunflowers, and not in the metaphorical sense either)? In lieu of Kristen Stewart’s surprisingly watchable performance given she has no script to work from, the remainder of the film lethargically checks off most every horror cliché while never positing one iota of fear or tension. From the isolated house with a past; ominous sounds which refuse to divulge their source; darkened, seemingly perpetual hallways; a dunk, dusty basement; false alarms and a gaggle of “boo” moments; all atop the rote scenario of a central character attempting to convenience the remainder of the cast of an imminent danger and a “surprise” antagonist who gives us the ever-so-predicable-to-the-point-of-irritating final, yet standard, “umph” before begrudgingly consenting to cease to be a nuisance any longer, nary one moment of inspiration, or interest for that matter, is to be had.
Yes, yes, yes, we have the “clever” inversion of a traditional horror thriller plot yet to no immediate or meaningful ends as the route in which we take to (not) get there is futility bifurcated via ghosts and an autonomous home. By film’s end, if we issue a large helping of benefit of the doubt to the 84-minute production (which, by industry standards, doesn’t even qualify as a feature-length film), we could argue that the Pangs were attempting to do for the two motifs what Steven Spielberg did for our perceptions of aliens with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But, once again, why?
If one accepts the haunted house as symbolic of the human evil enclosed within, then the directors’ countering the traditional metaphor while simultaneously presenting a dysfunctional family comes across as lamentable at best. Moreover, if our heroine is mentally unstable and her POV is unreliable, such is not paralleled by any other theme as the narrative strand is later abandoned without seeming notice or concern. Lastly, what–or are we–to make of the iconoclastic motion on behalf of the Pangs to have their villain strike an unrepentant Christ pose during the feature?
In short, Laura Clifford’s rhetorical query, “[ . . . ] just what is [an] Asian girl ghost doing in a Nebraska barn?” (the ghost in question is supposedly American stock and we’ll ignore the Illinois license plate for now) is representative of the whole of the Pang brother’s The Messengers, a film so bad that the only thing it accomplishes is proving that Hollywood has no respect for its highly gullible and naively trusting audience. After sinking “X” amount of dollars into a production, 16 million in The Messengers’s case, the financers–nevertheless wanting something back for their faux pas (to the point where taste can no longer be cited as being subjective)–unabashedly dumped a few extra dollars into a slick trailer so as to dupe potential ticket buyers out of their hard-earned cash. Sadly, the film opened at Number One at the Box Office.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
