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The Amityville lesson: houses have feelings too

By Matt Zoller Seitz
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Friday, Feb 16, 2007, Page 16

The Messengers lives up to the classic horror film tropes: don't look behind, don't open that door and don't live in that scary old house. PHOTOS: APPLAUSE

A key scene in The Messengers finds an anxious mom, Denise (Penelope Ann Miller), waking up in the farmhouse her family has just moved into, and discovering that the hideous dark stain she scrubbed out of her bedroom wallpaper just yesterday has reappeared at full strength.

This image is not just a plot point; it's a metaphor for the brand of horror filmmaking practiced by the movie's directors, Danny and Oxide Pang (The Eye, 見鬼), a brother team based in Hong Kong and Thailand, making their US debut. Even when they're working with weak material — the case with this haunted house picture, set around a South Dakota farm where a Chicago family has settled — the Pangs devise scenes so scary that they stain the imagination and never scrub out.

Poor Denise; her would-be farmer husband, Roy (Dylan McDermott); her troubled teenage daughter, Jess (Kristen Stewart); and her mute toddler son, Ben (Evan and Theodore Turner) clearly didn't see The Amityville Horror. Otherwise, they wouldn't spend more than one night in their new house, a desolate place with nighttime creaks aplenty, plus hair-raising apparitions (including a skittering thing that Ben thinks is his playmate) and an aggressive flock of crows.

Film Notes: The Messengers Directed by: Danny Pang (彭發) and Oxide Pang (彭順) Running time: 90 minutes. Starring: Kristen Stewart (Jess), Dylan McDermott (Roy), Penelope Ann Miller (Denise), John Corbett (Burwell), Evan Turner (Ben), Theodore Turner (Ben) and William B. Davis (Colby Price) Running time: 90 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

The children bear the brunt of the terror, and of course the parents don't understand; little Ben can't speak, and Jess is permanently grounded after a traumatic lapse in judgment that precipitated the family's move. The nomadic handyman, Burwell (a ponytailed John Corbett), who joins in the planting of sunflowers and befriends Jess, is a cryptic rock, but faced with such an immense evil that he's bound to break.

Like too many horror pictures, The Messengers becomes more boringly prosaic as it goes along, and there's an 11th-hour plot twist so dumb and poorly articulated that it destroys the movie. That's a shame, because shot for shot, the Pangs might be the most terrifying filmmakers alive.

Drawing equally on recent Japanese horror (that stain image was in Dark Water) and 1930s don't-open-that-door tropes, The Messengers is every ghost movie ever made, done better than many. Off-center compositions leave vast, empty spaces where evil can lurk; a nervous camera catches blurry figures an instant before they disappear behind a door frame; fiendishly mixed sound effects make it seem as if foul forces are rattling about, not just in the attic or basement, but inside your head. The Messengers is an unsatisfying film, but anyone who claims not to be scared by it is lying.

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