Is it just me or does it seem really racist to assume that any window reflection of an Asian person is a ghost? Shutter dares to disagree. Is it just me or is it near impossible to get a movie theater to focus the motherfucking projector when you’re watching the latest piece-of-shit Asian horror-film remake? Your local pimply teenage projectionist dares to disagree. These are two very angry thoughts I had while watching the remarkably crappy Shutter.
Replete with the worst acting I’ve ever seen, Pacey (Joshua Jackson) marries an anorexic bleach-blonde girl (Rachael Taylor) and travels to Japan the next day—wait, I thought Pacey was gay?! Apparently Pacey can snap a mean photograph, so he combines work with pleasure on a business trip/honeymoon in Tokyo. There, Pacey and Yellow Stick Girl hang out in a huge trendy loft and he takes fashion photos of geishas. But all of Pacey’s pictures contain blurry white smudges—and thanks to an acquaintance who just happens to edit a spirit-photo magazine, we discover that a ghost is haunting the happy couple. Armed with the ghost-hunting prowess of a Polaroid camera, Pacey and Stick Girl manage to find the desiccated corpse of a Japanese girl that Pacey used to screw. But even after her body is put to rest why, oh why, won’t she stop haunting their every picture? The official explanation is that she’s crazy (crazy in love with Pacey—hmm, I was always more of a Dawson fan, myself).
The most deplorable waste of time, Shutter manages to be boring, predictable, and dumb. Hell, it’s my job and I get paid for it, but that hardly made watching this worthless hunk of crap worthwhile. Even the obese Greshamites in the back of the theater could smell its derivative stink of failure—”It’s The Ring,” cackled some moviegoer. “No, it’s The Grudge,” called out a neighboring viewer. “It wishes,” I thought to myself in anger.