Film Reviews

The Messengers

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Dylan McDermott
• Details: US / 84mins (15A).

Roy (McDermott) takes his wife Denise (Miller), teenage daughter Jess (Stewart) and toddler Ben (played by Evan and Theodore Turner) from Boston to live on a small farm in Nowhere, North Dakota. Roy wants to put a recent family tragedy behind them and begins to work on the sunflower farm. However, the farmhouse turns out to be haunted (as they always are) but only and Ben and Jess can see the ghosts and, because their parents don't believe them, the kids turn to weird farmhand Burwell (Corbett) for help. The Messengers looks spooky, but the story is so obvious from the outset it's hard to say anything nice about it. Everything here has been done to death before and with nods to The Grudge, The Shining, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense, The Birds and The Amityville Horror (among others), The Messengers is a sorry compilation of horror movies - in fact, it should have been called Now That's What I Call Horror 98! There is the odd jump but that's down to the sound effects. When directors use loud shrieks on the soundtrack to get a jump out of the audience, it's because the story isn't doing its job and that's sorely evident here. We haven't seen the last of the Pangs either: let's hope their remake of 2002's The Eye is a little better. That's all we're asking and it's not a lot.

Review by Gavin Burke