Drago Endorses: The Messengers
If you’ve turned on your TV in the last month, you’ve probably seen a commercial for The Messengers. The most memorable thing from the commercial is the part where the mom is making the bed and there are some dead looking feet standing up under the covers. It would have been a lot cooler if that part wasn’t in the preview, but whatever.
The Messengers is full of wooden dialogue and one-dimensional characters, let’s get that out of the way right now. It’s also full of visuals that are very derivative of The Grudge and The Ring. Derivative in the same way that crack is a derivative of cocaine.
This movie takes the familiar J-horror themes of white-skinned dead people and creepy kids, which has been so overdone lately, and breathes new life into them by adding some American twists.
This movie’s heroine, Jess, is moved from Chicago to North Dakota by her out-of-work dad, who wants to start a sunflower farm (wtf?). If you’ve grown up in the city like Jess has, you can probably identify with the feelings of the isolation and the lack of homogenization that she starts experiencing. In addition to these feelings, she has some kind of drama in her past that keeps being hinted at, and her younger brother keeps acting weird. Imagine this, you are in a big old dirty house in the country, your parents are in town, your three-year-old brother keeps staring behind you and alternately giggling and looking scared, and you are a ninety pound girl. Yikezzers!
Parts of this movie remind us of like every Goosebumps book, because the kid knows something is fucked up, and the parents don’t believe them and think that the kid is crazy or trying to get attention or whatever. When we used to read Goosebumps and the parents start to get haunted by the same things that the kids have been seeing all along, we would say “Yeah, Fuck you, parents! You should have listened! Now the haunted mask is going to get you too, because YOU DIDN’T LISTEN TO YOUR SON!” But that’s our own issue. We digress.
There’s a bunch of good scares in this movie. The better ones occur when there is something moving slowly, just out of focus, behind Jess. The suspense is steadily ramped up by the directors, Danny and Oxide Pang (one of those must be a nickname), but the story falls a bit short at the ending. That being said, it’s a fun ride to get there and also, that girl who is in it is going to be really hot in a couple years, real talk.
