Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Gothika

(2003)

Five minutes into this movie Lee said “Another blue movie.” No, not porn, not smut. We’ve seen a lot of blue movies recently. What it means is, they are shot almost entirely in the dark, in shades of blue. Things are obscured by shadows and intervening objects. There’s a lot of lightning and rain. This is a pretty good sign that the script is a mess. People blunder around without any good reason. It’s also a whispering movie. Half the dialogue is whispered, and what with the moody music and eerie sound effects you can’t understand a good deal of it. With a DVD you can turn on the titles for the hearing-impaired, if you care enough to think you’re really missing something. We didn’t bother. That’s because it was also a “Huh?” movie. That means that when the credits start to roll, you turn to each other and say, in unison, “Huh?”