Kristen Stewart stars alongside Dylan McDermott and Penelope Ann Miller in what proves to be a numbing and soulless husk of a film. Stewart, here pre-Twilight, sadly adds very little to the turgid soup, save for presenting completests the opportunity to add to their collection of all things even remotely associated with the ‘Saga’ that seemingly never stops.
PG-13 Haunted House Horror-Lite
We get with The Messengers precious little more than your Joe-average, run-of-the-mill, bargain-basement, dog-eared, haunted house story. Although, there is some attempt by its directors to spruce up what really is a badly faded premise, it is in the end all to no avail. Well before it’s ‘was that it?’ conclusion the entire piece crumbles, sliding the slippery slope into instantly disposable mediocrity.
Although bound at the ankles by a decidedly PG-13 blend of weary scares and cookie cutter set-pieces, there may have been chance here to salvage the creepy little ghost tale that lurked shyly at the films heart. It needed to take chances, spin the audiences’ expectations off-kilter, inject some sort of dread and creeping terror into the sagging arteries of this lazy, and far too familiar, apparition.
Admittedly, the early teen demographic is a hard horror nut to crack. There is an ever-receding fine line that, for the most part, is extremely difficult to cross. The spooky cheap thrills provided by the bumbling ghosts and tame ghouls of the preteen set do not always age well into young adulthood. The PG-13 crowd hanker for more, but invariably get less. Popcorn and candyfloss scares, drenched in a sticky covering of over sentimentalized teen angst and rhinestone encrusted creatures of the night, abound.
Every generation needs a Freddy Kruegar; an iconic scare-monger with which to identify your own special zeitgeist. But The Messengers misses even this objective, instead falling into no man’s land, never knowing whether it is allowed to ramp up the scares or if it should instead keep them safe and market ready. Anything but surefooted, it struggles to present a narrative that begs a far darker edge. But with the Brothers Pang, here so uncomfortable in PG purgatory, a lighter shade of grey is about all that can be mustered.
A Damaged House for a Damaged Family
The film sets up with a sequence that acts as a kind of mini prequel; its five years before the main event and evil is about to set up shop. We are in a house, one that will of course take a leading role in the events now jostling impatiently to unfold. Here we witness a young family as they are terrorized by an unseen force. We are tricked, just for as moment, into believing that something evil may in fact this way cometh as they are dragged into the shadows – only to have their screams sucked into silence.
Jump forward five years and the Solomon family are seeking an escape. They shun the big city and decide that moving to the country, and growing sunflowers, will be just the balm to soothe their gently cracking family unit.
Jess Solomon (Kristen Stewart) is immediately lumbered here with a laughably unconvincing back-story, one that has her immediately labelled the ‘troubled teen’. Stewart has of course proven herself well suited to melancholy, but here she comes across as far too much of a ‘good girl’ to have ever been considered bad.
Her younger brother, Ben (Evan and Theodore Turner) does not speak – the result of a previous car accident, and passes his time seeing dead people. This ability becomes the core of the film and robotically plods a familiar path, one fill to bursting with many a tried and true attempt at cinematic jolt and scare.
John Corbett (Northern Exposure) turns up as soft-talkin’ drifter, John Burwell. He does offer a fleeting dose of mystery to the proceedings as we are half-heartedly urged to care if he is good or evil, most will not, but it all rapidly descends, rightly, into a mess of far too little too late. He is also party to the obligatory twist in the films tail, here more of a tangled knot, but by the time it delivers we have all already been telegraphed most all of its lame attempts to horrify.
The Pang brothers are not new to horror but their previous offerings have never really shaken the genre. They came close with Gin Gwai/ The Eye (2002) with its eerie fusion of sight and sound, though The Messengers is sadly forwarded little of this directorial potential. A direct-to-DVD sequel, of sorts, followed in 2009 (Messengers 2: The Scarecrow) with none of the original cast attached.
The Messengers
Jess: ‘You see them too... don't you?’
- Director … Oxide Pang Chun, Danny Pang (The Eye)
- Cast:
- Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, Kristen Stewart, John Corbett, Evan Turner
- Runtime … 90 minutes
- DVD Release Date: June 5, 2007 (US)
- United States
- Columbia Pictures
- Screen Gems
- Trailer: The Messengers
Hari Navarro - Hari Navarro is Topic Editor for Suite 101's Horror Film section and Editor/ Writer at online horror review site, The Hell Street ...
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