The Messengers

 

Director: Oxide Pang & Danny Pang

Cast: Dylan McDermott, Kristen Stewart, John Corbett.

The Messengers opens with a brief introduction showing a family (mother, daughter, son) being brutally murdered through the perspective of the young boy. As important as this scene becomes later in the film, I am not sure if it was such a great way to open. The idea was there, but the quality of the scene was quite sub-par! In fact I was pretty convinced that when it finished it would be reveled that the scene is in fact just a cheesy late night movie being watched by one of the films characters on TV. So by this point (5 minutes or so) I already had a bad taste in my mouth. Luckily it does improve from there.

The story plays out pretty typical. After losing his job, and all his savings, Roy Soloman (McDermott) decides to take a chance and invest into buying an old Sunflower farm (if that's what you call them) complete with an old spooky rundown house, and a barn. Of course his teenage daughter Jess (Stewart) is opposed to leaving her big city life where, OMG! No cell phone signal! To make the fathers life all the more frustrating, Jess is also completely at odds with her mother after some horrible event that happened in the city two years prior. Finally we have little brother Ben, who at the moment does not speak (Which ties into the infamous event in the city, which I will not reveal in this review). As told through the trailers, Ben is an important part of the films main theme. Only little kids can see Ghosts, most of the time. Luckily it doesn't take too long for the film to get going. Almost immediately little Ben starts to see the ghosts, and I must say the ghosts themselves, and they way they reveal themselves are the highlight of the film. They actually look pretty damn cool, and as a fresh take on things they are not just a bunch of long haired girls.

With the exception of a couple brief scenes, the entirety of the film takes place on the farm itself, which adds a lot to the confinement of the story. This is also helped by a cast only a few characters. The family it self, as well the sudden appearance of John Corbett playing a drifter turned farmhand after saving Roy from a sudden Crow attack. There is one character that was really not needed. Bobby! A generic movie boyfriend name, for an unnecessarily generic teenage boyfriend character. Who serves absolutely no purpose what-so-ever, except to be knocked out before being any help in the films final climactic finally.

The Messengers does out due a lot of the recent American Horror films. While at the moment it seems that a horror film has to be 90 minutes of some poor saps being slowly and sadistically mangled, it’s nice to get a film that uses silence and atmosphere to get the scares, and not a table full of torture equipment. This was the fist (but not last) attempt at making an American horror film, and it defiantly has more of an "American production directed by the Pang Brothers" then a "Pang Brothers film produced in America". However they do a great job of utilizing some of their wonderful talent into the film. Including some truly brilliant long pauses, and some great silent moments. Though not the same quality of some of the Pang bothers’ earlier work in Hong Kong and Thailand.

Rating: 7.0 out of 10.0