Gothika

GOTHIKA

Rating: C

Let me show you my tattoo.

Doug's dead. You killed him.

So Halle Berry learns, upon waking from a catatonic stupor. Doug is - er, was - her husband, and also her boss at the mental hospital where she worked as a psychiatrist. (If you're going to sleep your way to the top, set your sights a few rungs higher than your immediate supervisor.) That she's now a captive patient in the very same facility where she used to roam the halls freely is a humorous irony apparently lost on her. Of course she remembers nothing about the night of the murder, not even that her weapon of choice was an axe. What possessed her to commit this unspeakable act? What possessed them to make this movie?

Somehow this all connects to a creepy teenage girl who keeps popping up out of nowhere, carving "Not Alone" into Berry's forearm, and just generally all around beating the shit out of her every chance she gets. That's when she's not bursting into flames. I figured out almost immediately the chick was a ghost. (It'll probably take you longer, but that's okay.) She has long, tangled hair which obscures her face, looks like she just climbed out of a sewer pipe, and has this really weird way of walking like she has bubble gum stuck to the soles of her feet. In other words, the exact same "ghost" image fed to us in Stir of Echoes, Blair Witch 2, and The Ring. It seems like some kind of movie genre all to itself has sprung up around this one cheesy image. More likely than not, we've learned, these specters have some sordid secret they're trying to communicate to someone among the living, usually involving the way they were brutally murdered. For future reference, I've a couple of hints for any spooks out there who desire my help in such matters. Please do not carve letters into my forearm - it puts me in a contrary mood. Likewise, repeatedly throwing me against the wall will probably prove counterproductive to your cause. And whatever you do, kindly leave a message a little more descriptive of your problem than "Not Alone," and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

As if Berry didn't have enough problems, former co-worker Robert Downey Jr. is now her therapist, and has a not-so-secret desire to get in her pants. I don't know about you, but I didn't trust him for a moment. Then during one of her escape attempts, she spies someone trying to rape patient Penelope Cruz. She doesn't actually see anything of the rapist other than his tattoo of a woman in flames (how she manages this awkward feat is a story in itself). Which goes to show what I've always said: Tattoos are a bad idea because they'll use them to identify you after your next sexual assault. So now we go through the rest of the movie carefully scanning every character we meet, looking for the telltale edge of a burning woman tattoo peaking out from beneath their clothing. I thought it might be cool for the tattoo to be on ghostwoman (wouldn't that be a hoot?), but then I realized that the Stir of Echoes/Blair Witch 2/The Ring spook bore no such ink, and these writers would rather swallow razor blades than introduce an original idea into the script.

You know how some cheap horror movies have "cat scares," where a cat suddenly leaps out of the darkness at the main character, and everyone in the audience jumps in their seats? The good news is this film has no cat scares. The bad news is it instead has umbrella scares, owl scares, and car radio scares. Now I don't exactly have nightmares about umbrellas suddenly opening behind me, or my car radio suddenly blaring to life, so why do the filmmakers think these will be regarded as anything but transparent signs of desperation? I guess actually making the story itself scary was beyond their grasp. But the all-out worst sign of their cluelessness is when they include a throwaway scene of Berry swimming laps, without a single gratuitous shot of her in a clingy bathing suit. String 'em up!