Gothika

Crapika: Gothika

by Christian De Matteo

 PATHETIC

            I told Heather, my girlfriend, implicitly, not to watch Gothika, which she was purchasing the day it came out, not having seen it, yesterday, without me.  A)  I heard it was terrifying and she’s told me she doesn’t want to watch movies like that when she’s by herself.  B)  I really was dying to see it.

            I have been waiting, since Monster’s Ball, to see Halle Berry do something anywhere near on par with her unbelievable, totally worthy of the Oscar performance in that movie.  Instead I got X2, where she sucked as much and as hard as she did in the first.  I got Swordfish… which I didn’t bother to see.  And I got Die Another Day¸ the first Bond flick I haven’t even bothered to see after witnessing enough clips to realize that this wasn’t the movie I was going to get my Berry back (Berry back, Berry back) in.

            Oh… and lest we not all forget the abomination that is the Catwoman clip she sent to Oprah: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/aristotl.htm

            I hoped… hoped against hope, that Gothika would be the film to again showcase what I though was clear acting ability.

            It isn’t.  And the rest of the film pretty much sucks to.

            The scares are completely predictable and by the book.  The screenplay is an abomination to the lord, a sizzling pile of unrehearsed, unfounded, uninteresting crap that sizes into little more than a cacophony of crud.

            Halle Berry’s acting is so mechanical and lifeless, that I actually began to develop not a personal dislike for the character, but a personal dislike for Halle Berry as a human being.  Charles S. Dutton is given pure foolishness to act out, and the only one who does anything resembling a decent job, is the ever talented Robert Downey, Jr.  He delivers the only good line of the entire film, an off-handed gag line that I can’t help but be convinced was improved because the screenwriter doesn’t seem able to waste the brainpower needed for even one second of cleverness.

            The ghost of the film seems like the little girl from The Ring grown a few years, and acts pretty much the same as the Bathtub/Knifing Victim ghost in the much better Thirteen Ghosts.

Which brings me to Thirteen Ghosts.  Tony Shaloub’s remake knew it was silliness, but still managed to have inventive death scenes, and a real creepy atmosphere.  These attributes supersede the silliness issue by self-awareness and allow the film a pleasant place in my memory banks, even with a dumb “love conquers all” ending.  Gothika has no such redeeming value.

            By the end, Gothika has devolved into simply another The Sixth Sense clone, with badly adapted Ring and 8MM thefts.  Want creepy?  Watch The Ring.  Want classic creepy, how horror should really be done?  Watch Poltergeist.  Want some sort of convincing evidence that Halle Berry’s Monster’s Ball performance wasn’t a fluke?

            …well, I don’t think I can help there.           

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