‘Shutter’ comes up short

By Roger Moore

This Japanese horror flick remake doesn’t click.

The influence of the Japanese school of screen horror (”J-horror”) on Hollywood has led to a string of subtler, less violent and yet still chilling ghost stories, many of which are remakes of Japanese originals, films such as “The Grudge,” “The Ring” and “One Missed Call.”

They’re not witty frights or assaultive movies for the most part. They’re PG-13 explorations of very Japanese notions of the afterlife and disturbed occupants of “the spirit world.”

But when J-horror doesn’t work, it’s pretty darned boring stuff.

“Shutter” is a textbook example. This uncredited remake of a 2004 Thai film (”T-horror?”) has been Nippon-ized, with Japanese settings, supporting cast, director, crew and sensibilities. It has its moments. But even at 86 minutes, it’s a drag. And even at that length, things don’t happen fast enough to keep the viewer from jumping two steps ahead of the frights.

A newly married couple, blandly played by Rachael Taylor and Joshua Jackson, head off to Japan for a photo shoot assignment that the husband has landed. Ben used to live in Japan. He speaks Japanese. He still has friends at the company where he used to work.

But his pictures aren’t turning out. They have these wispy reflections in them. He attributes that to gear failure. But Jane, his wife, sees something else. She asks around. Darned if these aren’t “spirit photos,” images of ghosts. They’re old hat to the Japanese, who even have a magazine devoted to shots of dead relatives reaching out to family members and the like. Polaroid snapshots are ways “of connecting us with the unseen,” Ritsuo, the publisher (James Kyson Lee) explains. “I think they’re trying to tell us something.”

Well, yeah.

Jane and Ben had a car accident. Might the girl Jane was sure they hit be the spirit shadowing the couple? What does she (Megumi Okina) want?

No, that’s not hard to guess. But as we follow Jane, established early on as the jealous type, we’re treated to a few decent frights as the ghost makes her presence felt and seems bent on revenge. Clever scenes in a dark room and a darkened photo studio have bite. Unfortunately, little else in the film does.

Taylor (“Transformers”) is a pretty, thin thing, but as “real” as she makes this woman, she doesn’t give Jane a personality, just a curious nature. That’s a major shortcoming as the story is seen almost entirely from her point of view. “Dawson’s Creek” alumnus Jackson needs to suggest hidden layers that all those years on TV didn’t teach him to fake.

And director Masayuki Ochiai (”Infection”) may know a few cool locations to park his camera. But he fritters away what mystery there is in the script and shortchanges us in scenes that, in Hollywood hands, offer standard-issue chills — the visit to the medium, the mounting suspicions of the paranoid couple.

The result is a film that neatly fits ever so nearly in a genre, even if it doesn’t deliver the scary goods. “Shutter” is seriously short on shudders.