Shutter

Apparently, some Hollywood execs didn’t get the memo that PG-13 Japanese horror remakes stopped being interesting years ago. Yet, we get this one, and a slate of others is on the way. Joshua Jackson plays a photographer who has moved to Tokyo with his new wife (Rachael Taylor). While they drive to their honeymoon, a strange ghost-like apparition (as opposed to one of those normal ghost-like apparitions) jumps in front of their car, and so the haunting begins. The path of the story is very easy to predict, which makes all the stuff leading up to the inevitable a waste of time. Taylor has an impressive screen presence, but she’s just laboring in hackneyed swill this time out. There’s a whole “spirit photography” angle, where ghostly blurs appear in photographs. Most of the time, it just looks like overexposed film, which brings back memories of failing grades in high school photography class. Oh yeah … the film isn’t scary.