I Love Horror – A horror blog devoted to the critical, analytical, and cynical assessment of the horror industry and horror films.

uninivtied

My brother once described my reviews as hate speech masquerading as reviews. As such, this review will be relatively short, because I could go on for days discussing how fucking terrible this movie is.

This review contains some spoilers.

The Uninvited was dead in the water before it even got out of the boathouse. Asian horror remakes have mostly been lackluster affairs bordering on an affront to mankind, so this loose American remake of one of the few relatively decent though still pretty bad non-supernatural based horror films to come out of South Korea does little to buck the trend. It was, in essence, an unmitigated disaster, and perfectly representative of how and why Hollywood should not touch horror films.

If you’ve seen A Tale of Two Sisters, you’ll already know the gist of the plot; the innumerable changes in the remake, however, might throw you for a loop. Anna, a young, stereotypically attractive young girl, has been in a mental institution for ten months, the end result of having witnessed her invalid mother die in a fiery explosion. Upon being released and sent home, she meets her dad’s live in girlfriend, Rachel, of whom she is relatively apprehensive; and rightfully so, as she was the nurse who tended to her now deceased mother. This sentiment is equally expressed by her sister and best friend Alex, who believes her father prevented her from having any contact with Anna while she was incarcerated. As the film progresses Anna and Alex begin to believe that Rachel is responsible for the death of their mother, a theory to which the evidence is overwhelming. Eventually you learn the truth, which in turn leads to an hour-long diatribe as to why God would allow this film to be made.

While the original film wasn’t that good, it possessed a type of atmosphere that made it incredibly creepy; The Uninvited was anything but. Paper-thin characters, beautifully shot scenes of coastal Maine, and a hackneyed score that pinpointed the exact nanosecond a jump scare was coming did little to alleviate the woefully bad script and acting that is, sad to say, typical of PG-13 horror films. Elizabeth Banks couldn’t play a villain if her life depended on it, and the entire time I kept thinking of her as Zach’s hot-but-nerdy friend in Zach and Miri Make A Porno. Anything that made the original film good was done away with, and the end result was an almost family-friendly “thriller” that did little more than teach us not to judge daddy’s new girlfriend.

Throughout all these completely unnecessary and poorly chosen changes, the only one that actually needed to be changed completely is the ridiculously clichéd twist ending. The Uninvited managed to completely cast aside the aspects of the first film’s ending that made it not entirely vomit-worthy, yet twisted and warped it to conform to its lackluster storyline all while keeping intact the Adaptation-inspired ending of “they’re the same person.” Of course, it’s hard to fix something that’s so utterly broken, but at least they could have tried.

With the exception of The Ring, an American remake of an Asian horror film is just a bad idea. Whether it’s J-horror or South Korean horror (I’m not up to speed on any Chinese horror), the end result is always a laughable mess that loses every aspect of what made the original so good. Tonight I’m seeing the Friday the 13th remake. Expect more of the same tomorrow.