Shutter bug

I thought I knew at least of most J-Horror (as we must refer to the genre, thank you mindlessing America...) movies, but had never heard of Shutter, and yet this Shutter is an obvious take on a J-Horror movie... which turns out to be a Thai movie which I had never heard of before. (Ah, those wacky Thai.)

(Actually, I was also reminded a lot of The Sun Dog from the Four Past Midnight collection, but fortunately there is no Stephen King here.)

Certainly some mainstream J-Horror elements here, spirits turning up, strange things caught out of the corner of the eye, and of course something mundane turned into a source of terror (in this case, the camera). Not to mention atmosphere, which is something I always find separates Asian from American films (in that Asian films have it, American ones don't). Like The Grudge, Shutter has a Japanese director, who knows what he's doing, unlike the remake that was complete crap (yes, I'm talking about The Ring here).

All this adds up to great horror. Not as many deaths as some J-Horror movies, but the ones we get are pretty good. Plenty of scares abound as well, and not one due to a cat.

At 90 minutes it doesn't overstay it's welcome, and while it isn't Ju-On, it's still a decent film to see (if you like the genre at least).

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