Kate Beckinsale made this sorry sack of shit in between
Underworld sequels. It was directed by
D.J. (Disturbia) Caruso, from a script he co-wrote with actor Wentworth Miller.
Caruso isn’t really known as a horror
guy, so maybe that’s why this was such a miserable dud.
Kate and her family are city folk who move into the country
to live in a big old spooky house. They’re
only there a day and Kate is already seeing ghost dogs and having bad
dreams. She finds a locked door in her
attic that is apparently a “disappointments room”, a place where rich people
used to hide away their deformed children.
Gee, do you think something bad happened in there and now there are
ghosts haunting the place? If you’ve
seen as many of these things as I have, you’ll probably already know the answer.
The disappointments room is exactly where The
Disappointments Room belongs. It’s overly
derivative (it blatantly rips off The Shining and The Changeling), exceedingly
tedious, and not scary in the least. It
plods along at 85 minutes, but it feels much longer. Beckinsale is easy on the eyes though, so I
guess it could’ve been worse.
The movie also teases us endlessly with the possibility that
it could all be in Kate’s head. (She
stopped taking her anti-psycho pills, don’t you know.) All this subplot does is eat up a lot of
screen time and annoy the shit out of the audience. Just when you think we’re building up to some
sort of payoff, along comes one of the most infuriating non-endings I’ve seen
in some time. The only good part is a
fairly juicy head bashing scene, but since the head that gets bashed in belongs
to a ghost, it hardly matters.
I did get a kick out of seeing Gerald McRaney as the head
ghost though. Remember when he played
Major Dad? Now he’s playing Major DEAD.
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