Carnival of Scares.

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2011)

I didn't get to the end of this shock fest. Naomi Watts investigates an exceedingly strange videotape. Her friends are indifferent to her unease. A close examination of the tape, which seems to curse its viewers, reveals a connection to an Anna Morgan whose ranch full of prize horses appears to have died of some unfathomable epidemic on the beach and -- that's about where I left.
Possibly the climax revealed all and was done in a way that fascinated viewers as much as that bizarre VHS did, but I wouldn't know. A couple of elements were turn offs.
One is that it was filmed in a way that saturated the images -- ALL the images -- with a familiar ghoulish green. It's the color of a comic-book Zombie. Man, is that tiresome.
Another is that if the film managed to avoid a horror story cliché, I must have missed it. Watts enters a room accompanied by spooky music, sees the back of the baby sitter's body sitting stiffly upright in a chair, approaches the chair and occupant, reaches her hand out to touch the apparently lifeless shoulder -- and the baby sitter shrieks, having only been asleep. Watts has a frightening dream, wakes up and thrusts her open-mouthed face into the camera lens, her eyes bulging, her chest panting. The experienced viewer pendiculates.
I could see the plot developing in accordance with the usual textbook rules though. The shocks at first are minor, then grow more grotesque. The first truly bizarre experience that Naomi Watts has comes during one of her many playbacks of the tape. She stops it, zooms in on a fly that always has appeared in one corner of the screen, reaches tentatively towards it and then picks it out of the image, alive. Then what does she do? She's distracted and apparently releases the fly deliberately, uninterested in learning more about it. I'd have had it in a jar pronto and taken it to the nearest entomologist for a closer look at this mysterious mouche.
Next up the scale, she's on the phone and begins coughing and hacks up a long string of what appears to be twined human hair, maybe a yard long, with some kind of small plastic device on the end of it. The object, whatever it is, shares the destiny of that fly. Nothing more is heard of it. The entire incident is immediately forgotten by Watts and dropped from the story.
I noted before that when Naomi Watts wakes from a bad dream she sits upright and thrusts her open-mouthed face into the lens. That mouth almost saves the picture. In a movie full of dark shadows, rain, dampness, and green, Watt's two incisors are the only things that glisten. My God, those incisors belong on Bugs Bunny. I was in their thrall throughout. In some inexplicable way they add to Watts' delicate blond beauty. Talk about mysteries! That's about it. Naturally nobody believes Watts and her friends are helpless and any witnesses don't like to talk about the past and her child is in jeopardy and blah blah blah. I wonder what the original was like.