Viewed: The Messengers

To take my mind off of my current woes, one of my friends took me to see The Messengers.

The good news is that it's by the Pang Brothers, which means that there's some honest spookyness to be found, as well as nice treatments of standard horror tropes. This surprisingly decent film ends the moment the "We don't believe you saw ghosts," subplot rears it's ugly head. From that moment on, you'll be reminded of the time each of your friends had come up with an ending for The Eye that would've been better than the one that was actually filmed. That is, assuming your friends told you about that moment... they might still be worried that you'd be upset you were never invited to their The Eye party.

Are you ready for the big spoilers? Because if not, then not only should you have stopped reading this a few minutes ago, but also stayed away from every other review of the film. Let's take this one for example. It doesn't want to give much about the film away, except to tell you that the ghosts aren't the villains of the piece. And that the ending's obvious, and uses generic twists you've seen many times before.

I am quite confident that you are an intelligent person. Now that you know that the ghosts aren't the villains, but there is a villain to be found, the sudden introduction of a friendly farmhand with an undefined past is going to set all of your alarms ringing. I'd go so far as to say that you might not have made this connection without this preknowledge, since it honestly doesn't make much sense. While I can buy ghosts not being great communicators, there's a difference between being misunderstood, and beating the hell out of people.

The genericness of the plot is something the reader ought to know, but there has to be a better way of going about it. At the very least, the review fails just by trying to compare parts of The Messengers to The Shining, The Ring, or The Grudge. When the movie was meeting my low expectations, I didn't really feel like comparing it to any of those films. And when it wasn't, the only thing that sprang to mind was a dimly-recalled Halloween special on The Lifetime Network.

Of course, just comparing the film to a Lifetime Movie would also probably have given the game away. But at least then you'd be wondering if it was the husband or the handyman who dunnit.