The Orphange is seriously overrated

Rating: 1/10 (5 April 2008)

First of all, I love foreign movies and do not have a problem with following subtitles, I can focus on both the subs and what is happening on screen at the same time, secondly, I love Italian horror movies, Suspiria is in my top five horror movies list, thirdly I do not have a problem with horror movies that have no gore, some of my favourite gore-less horror movies are The Innocents, The Haunting, The Changeling etc etc. Now to The Orphanage, I feel that the rave reviews on this one are due to the film having something to do with the director of Pan's Labyrinth (another seriously overrated movie which looks clever on the surface but when you delve deeper is less than cerebral) I have news for those reviewers, Del Toro did not direct this, he merely gave his name to it so the film would garner more attention. Now to the performances and the plot of the movie itself, the main actress is really irritating as the mother of the missing child, she just comes across as a hysterical neurotic. The son is one dimensional and the fact that he is HIV positive seems to be an effort by the scriptwriters to lend the film a contemporary sympathetic edge, it does not work with me. Why did he have to have Aids? Why not Cancer? I will leave that up to you to decide. Now people are saying this movie is scary, if you find watching Bugs Bunny cartoons scary then yes this movie will be scary to you. The whole film is a mishmash of generic "scary" music playing in the background, shots of dark murky corners and damp basements, the hysterical mother walking around with a melancholic expression, echoes of children's voices, dark figures of children flitting past the camera lens and thats it, yes, that's all folks. Zero character development and as for the ending, the word is pathetic, it turns out the son has been alive all this time, after days and days of his mother's searching, what has he been doing? it seems he has been hanging around in a dark dungeon all this time without making any attempt to get out of there and contact his mother, how has he been feeding himself? To top it off, it turns out that the ghosts were friendly after all and happen to be the childhood friends of the son's mother, as they crowd round the tearful mother and her son at the end manipulative "emotional" music plays in a pathetic attempt to get to the the heart strings of the probably gullible audience.
These days if I look at a review on IMDb of a newly released film and it has any more than 6 stars I usually know it will turn out to be a 1 star film in reality.