Shutter is about a young newlywed couple that is haunted by a ghost. The young man is a professional photographer and he gets a job to do a photo shoot in Japan. The couple appear to run over a woman while driving around in Japan, but the body never does turn up. Afterwards, they start to see strange occurrences and images in the massive amounts of photographs that the two are taking while on their trip. Eventually, the spirit manifests itself into more than just photo irregularities and tries to kill the couple and their friends. Will they figure out the ghost’s terrible secret before it’s too late? This, my friends, is Shutter.

Like William Wallace had an uncanny ability to detect a trap before it was revealed, WL Paynecraft has an equally uncanny ability to detect a shitfest from merely viewing the trailer. This movie was no exception. The trailer looked like crap and had the same marketing trappings that Hollywood has used countless times before to lure unsuspecting 13-year-old girls to go watch this movie. I would never have watched this movie to begin with, since viewing this uninspiring trailer. However, it was Saturday night, the Mrs. and I were wanting to go watch a movie, and there was an awesomely bad selection of crap on at the theater otherwise. It was this, The Other Bolyn Girl, or Bunny in Easterland or some shit. This had to do. I didn’t even know this was a remake, though I should have known.

They should have named this movie "Shitter". It’s another lame Hollywood McHorror movie that they seem to be cranking out pretty regularly nowadays. It felt like they based the whole movie around the overdone dark haired scary girl Asian ghost that had success six years ago. In addition, I swear that several of the scenes were totally designed around a cheap jump scare that they were trying to set up. Several times I asked myself “Why is this person doing this?” and then suddenly there would be loud music, a dramatic camera turn, and then a cheap jump scare with no payoff. And then I was like “Ohhhh, they were setting all of this up to create a jump scare. How uninspiring.”

For me, the movie had a lot of holes and seemed poorly written. I cannot account for how or why the main piece of evidence in the movie even came about. This is a big deal to me. The terrible secret that was revealed at the end came across as ludicrous and contrived. It’s like they needed a reason for the ghost to be haunting these people, so they made one up after the fact.

Much of the movie was unrealistic. At one point in the movie, the two main characters were lying in bed. They had both been tormented by the ghost relentlessly to this point and I think that one of their friends was even murdered by it. Yeah, they are both sleeping peacefully. Then the dude gets awakened and tortured again by the ghost. The girl wakes up from her sound sleep and asks what is wrong. What the hell does she think is wrong? There’s a murderous ghost running around here and they are sleeping not expecting it to attack and it just kicked his ass.!! How unrealistic is this? If I even get a downwind rumor that a ghost is in my house, I’m crapping my pants and getting in the car and leaving without my clothes and shit. This couple is getting hammered by the ghost constantly and they keep blowing it off. Preposterous. Plus the movie kept dousing me with non-nude sex scenes. What the fuck?

To summarize, this movie is clumsy and poor. Hollywood apparently thinks their movie viewers are complete idiots and require nothing more than a flashy trailer and a couple jump scares. I hear that the original was kickass, but I don’t even care about that shit anymore. There is nothing original about this movie, except for the photo at the end, and it was pretty silly. Paynecraft the Patient gives this movie 4 out of 10 literal metaphors.

This review was fueled by Hobgoblin and King Diamond’s latest release, Give Me Your Soul…Please. Don’t give this movie your money…please.