The Uninvited (2009)

The Uninvited (2009)

Written by Craig Rosenburg, Doug Miro, & Carlo Bernard, based on the film Changhwa Hongryon by Ji-woon Kim

Directed by Charles and Thomas Guard

            What a turd! Every now and then a film comes around that just surprises me.  In this case, I was surprised by the amount of people that saw this this past summer and enjoyed it.  All summer long, people were singing its praises, and I kept putting it off, because I didn’t really give a shit.  Now that I’ve seen it, I’ve realized that I wasted my time.  I’ve never been able to understand the recent spat of Japanese horror film remakes, and this giant elephant turd hasn’t changed my opinion one bit.

            The Uninvited is about a girl, Anna (played by the strangly beautiful and otherwise perfectly capable Emily Browning), who returns home after 10 months in the mental hospital after being placed there due to her mother’s death by both fire and disease.  For anybody who is familiar with movies, that one sentence synopsis, which is given right on the back of the DVD case, should give every indication of what happens in this movie.  After she returns home, she is greeted by her sister, Alex (played by Arielle Kebbel), her father (David Strathairn), and her father’s new sperm receptacle Rachel (Elizabeth Banks).  Naturally, Anna and her sister both think Rachel is out to get them, and they start out on a quest to vanquish her for all of eternity.

            The movie starts out strong.  The opening scene is creepy as hell.  In fact, throughout the whole movie, there are a bunch of qenuinely frightening scenes and imagery.  The bad part is that once you figure out the twist that is coming (which I did after about 15 minutes), the rest of the movie just doesn’t matter.  It’s just not scary when you realize what’s going on.  My biggest qualm is: if you can’t trust the main character, why should you trust her?  The fact that she was in a mental hospital for 10 months is the biggest bullshit indicator.  She was obviously there for a reason, even if that reason isn’t given until the end of the film.  I understand how this would be an interesting concept.  It worked for The Butterfly Effect, Running Scared, and every other film that starts at the end and then rewinds back to tell you the whole story.  The problem here is that we don’t start at the end.  We start in the beginning with some crazy chick.  So if she’s crazy, all the frightening imagery is just pointless.  She’s crazy and it’s not real, so we know it can’t hurt her, so why does it matter?  This leads me to the next thing I didn’t like.

            The acting.  Everybody here is otherwise perfectly capable of giving a great performance.  Elizabeth Banks is one of my favorite comedic actresses.  Here, she’s used in a dramatic role, and she really doesn’t deliver.  She’s supposed to be ambiguous, you’re not supposed to be able to tell if she’s really evil or just misunderstood.  The problem is that she just always comes across as evil.  David Strathairn is one of those “Oh it’s THAT guy” actors who you’ve seen everywhere and you always love him, but you never know his name.  He is the only one that delivered, unfortunately he was just underused here.  Emily Browning is a young actress that I really like, but I just haven’t seen her in much.  She was good in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and Ghost Ship, two movies that were very underrated IMHO.  And here, she’s fine.  She never sticks out but she’s not bad either.  She’s just ok.  However, once the twist happens, you’ll stop caring about her.  Arielle Kebbel is just a terrible actress, but she looks great, and I thought she was hilarious in John Tucker Must Die. 

            Just about the only good thing here was the way the flick looked.  I loved the locations, the cinematography, and like I said earlier, the scares, had they been used in a better written movie, would have been terrifying.  I’m going to place the blame for this movie’s crappiness on the writing.  Maybe it was the twist bullshit, maybe it was the chronology, I’m not sure, but this movie was just plain not good.  Also, why was it called "The Uninvited"?  The title has nothing to do with the movie.  Was it Rachel who was uninvited?  Who knows.  It wasn’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t even remotely good.  I’m interested in seeing the original Japanese version (the poster for which is up above), but I don’t think I care enough to actually watch it.  I’d give The Uninvited a 4/10.