Gothika (Widescreen Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Perfect Ghost Thriller
Review: Gothika is a great scary movie. Watching it, you just get sucked into it and mesmerized, wondering what will happen next and yet not wanting the movie to end.

The setting is perfect. A mental institution that is every bit as dark and Gothic as Arkam Asylum, home of the criminals and villians in Batman's Gotham City. In a way, Gothika and the Gotham City mythos are a bit related.

In Gothika, it rains. The rain lends one hundred percent to the mood. Halle Berry is a brilliant young psychiatrist who works at the institution. Her husband, also a psychiatrist, is in charge of it. Berry is treating a young patient with terrible dementia. Driving home in the rain, Berry has a supernatural encounter with a vengeful spirit. She is not the same after that, and soon becomes a patient at the same institution where she used to be top staff.

The mystery keeps deepening, and Halle plots her escape. Pulse-pounding, nail-biting, haunting, and beautiful, Gothika is intense. It will leave you feeling a bit drained, and changed, like Berry's character.


The song at the end during the film's final moments you will never forget.

A WARNING: GRAPHIC RAPE SCENES MAY TRIGGER ABUSE MEMORIES FOR ANYONE WHO WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED

Rating:
Summary: You can do worse during an evening at home.
Review: Stylish direction and very good acting (especially by Halle Berry and Robert Downey, Jr.) are somewhat done in by an often obvious script. If plot points and clues were presented with anywhere near the subtlety seen in the directing or acting, this movie really could have been something. Instead, the film ends up being fairly entertaining yet predictable. I don't know if this is the fault of the script writers or the director, the latter of whom probably had the power to better hide the clues or alter the dialogue and exposition during shooting to avoid letting the various cats out of the bag too soon. Still, this isn't a horrid film, and I don't hesitate to recommend it as a rental or an inexpensive purchase. Picture and sound on the DVD are generally excellent, and there are a few interesting extra features. Overall, this isn't a bad little film to discover on DVD.

Rating:
Summary: So-so!
Review: A psychiatrist, Dr Miranda Grey (played by Halle Berry), works in a a somewhat 'gothic' looking psychiatric institution, run by her husband, Dr Douglas Grey, played by Charles Dutton. One stormy night she leaves for home after work when she is forced to take a detour via a deserted road where she nearly runs into a girl standing in the middle of the road. Dr Grey swerves to avoid her, and instead crashes into a tree. She appears okay but rushes to check on the girl, who then self immolates in front of her eyes.

Dr Grey then wakes up to find herself as a patient in her very own hospital. She's been accused of murdering her husband, but cannot recall the events leading up to her institutionalisation. The story then focuses on her struggle to regain her memories, prove her sanity, and escape from this institution.

Director Mathieu Kassovitz (Crimson Rivers) adopts a high-tech look for the whole film, with some shots occasionally looking too much like music video footage. However, overall he does deliver a fairly stylish film with perhaps more emphasis on the thriller aspect rather than horror, though this film very much follows a supernatural storyline. Unfortunately many of the film's 'moments' are telegraphed to the viewer either through the dialogue or lead up sequences.

However, the film is lent some weight by some good performances, especially from Halle and a smaller role from Penelope Cruz as a fellow patient, though this is very much a vehicle for Berry.


Rating:
Summary: Gothikless
Review: This film does not provoke a gothic atmosphere. No, not at all. More like a sterile, monochrome and lifeless. So I'm afraid the title is a complete and utter lie.

As a horror film this is a total potboiler. As a Dark Castle production it's the worst yet. Why on earth would a freshly won Oscar-winning actress do such drek?

The story is the most predictable and boring ever. You can literally see all the twists and revelations coming. There are also gaping holes in the logic. Such as if the ghost of Rachel can have a physical effect on the real world, then why would she need Miranda at all?

Well there wouldn't be a film if the director realized this. But then again, that would be a good thing. A complete waste of time! Zemeckis and Silver should know better.

The DVD is in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby 5.1 sound. There are extras but I don't care.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: I was actually wanting to watch this movie, and insisted on watching it, despite the fact it's not a Christmas movie & lets face it, we're on the run up to Christmas here. Also, I loved the poster. It's very effective & yet, doesn't give anything away about the movie. Neither does the title. Which to me, would have been plus points towards the movie. And since these are the only two things I found good about this movie, then that's the reason I'm giving it two stars.

There's plenty of typical horror movie cliches in this, and ends on a really dumb note, losing the viewer's attention once they've worked out what's going to happen.

Halle Berry looks fairly different to how she normally does, and I was loving the fringe. But the fact that she's super skinny in this was very distracting for me. She needs a good feeding, and if she turned sideways, and there was a crack in the floor, then she'd go straight through. Halle broke her arm filming a scene with Robert Downey Jr.. Downey was supposed to grab her arm and twist but twisted too hard and the arm snapped. Berry wore a cast during the rest of the filming, which is visible at times. Production was halted for eight weeks.

The setting of the movie is extremely depressing, with no variation on the setting outside of the psychiatric hospital, apart from the occasional flashback. Some movies can pull this off, but when you're watching it in the dark, and not really getting it in the first place, then the rooms just merge into one, and you can't tell between the scenes.

Roles also shift constantly throughout the movie. The crazy people seem normal, the normal people seem crazy, and the responsible people seem dangerous. There are so many suspects in this movie, which in these kinda movies, is normal, but when it's been done over & over, it's really no different to any other movies of the same genre.

I found this movie very boring and wouldn't recommend it at all. It disappoints at its best, and leaves you utterly bored by the end.

Rating:
Summary: Style Over Substance
Review: Somewhere under the skin of "Gothika," a slick movie produced by Joel Silver (who must be slipping -- this flick isn't nearly up to the standards of "Demolition Man" or "Predator") is a movie with a heart and soul.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it, because the actors' performances are solid across the board, the soundtrack is riveting and the photography is gorgeous. Yet, this movie didn't come off as sincere. It was as though the director (Mathieu Kassovitz) didn't have much faith in the strength of his screenplay, which had a pretty good story.

So, Kassovitz and Silver piled every single computer-generated special effect they could, in order to wow the viewer. But, instead of wowing me, seeing the endless 360-degree tilt-o-whirl pans and ghostly apparitions fading in and out only threw the movie's timing off. It was distracting, and worse, made it easier to predict what was going to happen next, thus taking an above-average script and sacrificing it to CGI animated fluff.

Then, about a week later, I found out why. On television, TBS was broadcasting a movie with a nearly identical plot and theme, even down to the MacGuffins. However, this movie -- "What Lies Beneath," directed by Robert Zemeckis in 2000, three years before "Gothika" -- relied on simple exposition and dialogue and montage more so than special effects to get its story across. I thus understood: "Gothika" needed a large measure of visual camouflage to shroud the fact that it was a warmed-over remake of a much better movie.

So, go, and see the much better movie. Rent "What Lies Beneath" tonight. Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer are excellent in it and Zemeckis has been around long enough to know that the technical wizardry that worked so well in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" would be superfluous to a serious thriller.