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 So we needed something that wouldn’t be too frightening because my daughter wanted to plop down and watch a flick with us. This one seemed to do the trick in that regards. It was surely entertaining enough for a 6-year-old. Yes, I know she shouldn’t be watching it because it is PG-13. One day she may be on the counselor’s couch holding me responsible for all these nightmares that stem from all the way back to a paternal culprit - her well intentioned father and his misplaced entertainment outlook. But, really, this movie was kind of dumb, stupid. It was hackneyed, listless, uninspired, nothing you will see in The Messengers is anything you didn’t see in countless other run of the mill horror jobs this side of Bella Lugosi. If my daughter will suffer from nightmares at a later date, she will not have a clue where they got them. All of the ideas in The Messengers are hokey and have been done before and much better. Are you getting the message? Please don’t’ kill the messenger (Okay, you should kill The Messenger).
At the movie's beginning, a frightened woman is with her son, telling him that he has to be strong and that everything is going to be okay (yawn). She hears something coming towards the door and commands her son to hide under the bed. The door bursts open and an unseen figure throws the woman against the wall. The son, terrified, runs out of the room and into his sister’s room, where his sister is also scared. She grabs him and they run down the stairs.
The boy hides under a table, but his sister is, unfortunately, caught and pushed over the stair railings. However, she manages to crawl to the son and tells him to run. Soon she is dragged to the hallway and then to the cellar while her nails scratch on the floor. The boy runs into the kitchen and hides in the under sink cabinet, but he is soon found and pulled out. We guess he gets killed too.
Then come the Dumbshits.
Who are the Dumbshits. These are the typical movie family fodder people that are leaving the big city and some sort of vague trouble that will forever haunt their teenage daughter, who will only find a true friend to confide in at the local basket ball court and find it hard to adapt to this corn fed community of insular people of which nobody seems to know what happened to the Remington’s or the Rawlings or whoever the fuck they were, that were all killed in the house.
They, the Dumbshits, will buy the biggest piece of shit haunted house in the middle of a farm and think this is a good place to start over. There is also a cute kid riding along, who in a rip off of The Sixth Sense can see the danger nobody else can. Oh, my, he might see dead people. Been there. Done that. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.
Yes, there is some weird shit about crows flying, which was not too bad in concept, but this movie really sucked. Too many things did not fit together.
If you must know, and you couldn’t see this coming from miles away, the messengers who seem to be scary because they move toys, grab people and such, are really the helpless family we show getting vaguely killed in the opening black and white sequence.
And this didn’t make sense. Why shoot the opening scene in black and white as if the guy/monster/spirit who murdered everybody lived in the modern day world of color. I could see if The Messengers included a family killed back in the 40s or something and now we are in the modern time. But, the whole film takes place in the same era so why the change of color? Is it time to show flash backs in the 90s in black and white?
And, here is something else that really didn’t make sense at all.
The guy that killed them looked just as old as he did when we finally get to see him in the black and white scenes slaughtering his family. Another issue is that nobody in this fucked up town wondered what happened to the original family? I hate to give the plot away, but jeez…. The murderer was the dufus next door? This fucking weirdo was never questioned when the original family was simply murdered? Oh, man. That is a stretch. And, the whole family disappeared off the face of the map and in a small town nobody told the Dumbshits. Well, I am warning all of you out there – this movie is a joker. Don’t’ be a dumbshit. Heed my warning. Matthew J. DeReno is a writer living in Pittsburgh.
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