Gothika

[Gh0st Face Killah]

Watched this alst night on a region 1 dvd. (ahh the joys of play!) An excellent gripping thriller. Halle Berry turns in a superb performance and there are some nice little twists and turns in the plot.  Robert Downey Jr plays a bumbling doc superbly, and the angst he goes through when having to treat Halle Berry is fantastic. Recommended viewing.

[Dr Sadako]

:huh:

Did we watch the same movie for real? Utter piece of crap with a story so recycled I couldn't believe it. The dialogue was not cared for and the entire movie was built up on cheap scares and "do you believe in ghosts".

1/5  :devil:

Halle Berry is always attractive but should pick movies with better care.

[smilodon]

I'm with you on this Ghosty. And I'm also with you on this one Sadako.

This film was rubbish. The plot didn't make sense, the shocks were lurid and sometimes pointless. It had all the hallmarks of one of those straight to vidio horror flicks. What Halley Berry was doing in it I have no idea.

However......this film doesn't work as a film with a plot and for a while I wasn't sure it was meant to. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't end properly. What it does do is to envoke all sorts of emotions as it runs along. It has great style and atmosphere. Try thinking about your last/worst nightmare. I bet it didn't make sense. It probably jumped about all over the place and didn't end properly. I'm not sure if this was the intention of either the director or writer, but what they made wasn't a film with the plot and an ending but a film of a nightmare. And nightmares don't have plots or logic or narative flow. And they certainly don't have nice neat endings.

That being said the film was crap because I don't actually think they tried to do this. I think they set out to make a standard scary horror film. In this they failed and ended up with a mess of a movie.

The odd thing is that by some weird fluke if you watch it in a certain way, it does seem to be like watching someones nightmare. For a while that's exactly what I thought it was going to be and that I'd gotten the final twist a quarter of the way through the film. This was Halley Berry having a nightmare. A sort of Jacobs Ladder where you're sleeping not dieing.

By the end I realised neither the director nor the writer were clever enough to have done this and that they had indeed made a crap film. But it was a weird crap film that was interesting to watch as you went along and a big disappointment when it had finished.

[Gh0st Face Killah]

Having watched it a second time when I wasn't quite so drunk, its not as good as i thought, however as Smilodon says from the point of view of representing a nightmare its superb.