Eyes Wide Open

After the outright disaster that was One Missed Call, I have to say that I've been more nervous than ever about future remakes of Asian horror movies. I thought Pulse was bad enough and One Missed Call was even worse, so I was a little worried about the new remake of The Eye. I went into it this afternoon hoping that it would at least be better than One Missed Call, and I have to say that I was pleasently surprised.

Having seen (and enjoyed) the original Chinese version of The Eye, I didn't think there were a whole lot of surprises during the remake. It follows the original relatively tightly, with only a handful of minor differences. But that isn't a negative at all. The American version of The Eye is a very solid movie from start to finish. The scares are really well done, the suspense is tight, and Jessica Alba puts forth a great, convincing performance. Truth be told, I can't think of anything negative to say about it.

I don't know if I'd put it on the same level as the remakes of The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water, all of which I thought were fantastic. But The Eye is a pretty darn good remake, and an entertaining movie in general. I'll give it a thumbs-up with three and a half stars on the patent-pending Five-Star Sutton Scale. Go check it out, horror fans.

The only bad part of my trip to the movies this afternoon? The kid sitting in the row behind me. Some adults were chaperoning a group of adolescents, and the youngest one couldn't have been much older than seven or eight. This kid just wouldn't sit still; he would only actually sit down for maybe ten minutes at a time. He was up walking around for at least half the movie. And it wasn't helping that he would have conversations with the adults, who apparently had no clue how to whisper. At least the kid kept quiet. And every so often, you'd hear the adults to tell the kid to cover his eyes. Why let a kid watch a horror movie if you're not going to let him see the scary scenes? Watching a horror movie and covering your eyes during the scary scenes is like watching a musical and skipping over the songs. I guess I'm just not a proponent of taking young kids to see movies they probably shouldn't be seeing. For example, I remember someone bringing an infant into the theater with them during the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake a few years back. Who does that? If you can't get a babysitter, can't you just wait a few months for it to turn up on DVD or pay-per-view? There should be some kind of theater policy or something about this.

So anyway, I liked the remake of The Eye, but I don't particularly care for people that bring their kids (especially the unruly ones) to horror movies.