Teenage Girls Taunted by Evil Stepmother - 'The Uninvited' Review...
Horror movies have changed so much over the years, mostly for the worse, that when one is released now that uses a lot of classic techniques, it looks more like a thriller than a horror movie because there are no chainsaws or CGI bloodbaths or bizarre, medieval torture devices. A PG-13 rating is generally a death sentence for a modern horror film, particularly for horror fans who want to see a horror movie and not some idiotic teen sex comedy where half the cast gradually gets killed off, but The Uninvited focuses instead on an interesting story and some unpredictable, if not entirely original, twists and turns.The story resembles a Stephen King story in many ways. The father is a successful novelist, his wife died violently a year earlier than the story takes place, driving one of the two daughters into an insane asylum and the other still living at home alone with the father and his new girlfriend. Anna, played impressively by Emily Browning (who has a name and a face that seems to suggest that she would be right at home in a period film), the daughter who lived in an insane asylum for the last ten months, and Arielle Kebbell plays her sister Alex. They’re teenage girls so obviously they are deeply unhappy with Rachel, dad’s new woman, but it doesn’t help that she is also their mothers former caregiver and Anna is having visions telling her that Rachel was involved in her death.
The visions become increasingly scary and convincing, and ultimately Anna approaches her sister, her father, and even Rachel with her suspicions, setting off a destructive series of events that threatens the fabric of the entire family.The movie is amazingly well structured and never gets exploitive of the blood and guts to push it along. It will seem a little slow at times but undeniably has a sufficiently interesting story that it doesn’t need to pull a lot of the cheap, gimmicky tricks that lesser horror films so often revert to. But it does take place very firmly in the parallel world where these kinds of things take place, the world where teenage girls’ (and boys) very real suspicions and dislikes of the parents’ new significant others are not only true but far, far worse than they imagine, and when confronted they calmly explain that they hope not to be forced to kill them or send them away to a crazy house.
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[/caption]I love the way the story is told and I found the story highly interesting, the twists impressive and even the jump-out-of-your seat scares to actually be pretty effective. It is so rare that a modern horror film ever makes me jump anymore because the scare techniques are so cheap and predictable, and even when it does occasionally happen, it’s often the only interesting or memorable thing about the whole movie. I was pleasantly surprised to see some effective ones in The Uninvited, although the movie’s sense of realism is pretty weak.
Ultimately it’s a psychological thriller, and it reminds me the also highly impressive In Dreams, but I think if they had put more effort into making it a little more realistic, a little more connected to a three-dimensional world that we can relate to more directly it would have made it a different and slightly better movie. As it is, it’s great late-night entertainment,
one of those horror movies that would is entertaining to the horror fan and still good for teenagers to take a date to see, but it also has an unmistakable feel of a made-for-tv dramatic thriller.It should be noted that the movie is a remake of a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters, and that some of the Korean filmmaking techniques have been brought over into the America version, but not so much that it overshadows the rest of the movie. Fans of the original will no doubt hate the remake, automatically assuming it to be a Hollywood money-grab and also because The Grudge fiasco has made it cool to hate Hollywood remakes of Asian horror movies, but at least in that vein it stands far above the rest. “American remake” has become a term almost synonymous with bad movies, so it is nice to see one emerge as an exception.
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