Unimaginative horror

Gothika

Starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr. and Penelope Cruz

Directed…

Gothika

Starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr. and Penelope Cruz

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Are “crazy people” really insane? Or are they just taunted by ghosts?

“Gothika” suggests the latter.

Unfortunately, it does so with a wrenchingly linear, vengeful-ghost plot. You can easily figure out its game from the first few scenes.

In its unimaginative logic-minded-protagonist-confronted-with-the-supernatural story, which culminates with the cringer of a line, “Logic is overrated,” the film, set in a women’s asylum, has a doctor-turned-patient, Miranda (Halle Berry), haunted by a dead girl. After a trippy encounter with the zombie-like girl in the middle of the road, Miranda wakes up an inmate, apparently the murderer – axe murderer, that is – of her husband, head of the asylum, Doug (Charles S. Dutton).

Why she was so quickly thrown in an asylum – one she worked in, no less – rather than a prison is beyond me. But anyway.

Miranda has no recollection of how she landed on the inside, but insists she’s innocent. Meanwhile, she’s terrorized by the mysterious girl from the road, who either wants to clue her in to the truth – she scrawls the phrase “not alone” on everything, including Miranda – or just plain, old-fashioned wants to kill her.

There is little suspense, though. The film packs nothing more than startles. I lost track of how many times the ghostly girl popped into frame, accompanied by a spike of sound, and turned out to be not really there a second later. This is as cheap as horror gets.

Otherwise, director Mathieu Kassovitz’s attempts to jangle our nerves are far too reliant on technical effects to be effective. There’s a dud of a money shot that zooms in on and traces the hair on the back of Berry’s neck during a scene that’s supposed to be particularly tense.

Give me the purity of creaky footsteps and lights going out any day.

Robert Downey Jr. – slumming – plays Miranda’s colleague-turned-doctor, who acts weird enough to be a suspect, and Penelope Cruz is an inmate who claims that Satan rapes her in her cell – the film eventually suggests that she may be telling the truth.

Some of the film’s subject matter – the opening, for instance, which has Cruz’s character describing how she slashed the throat of her molesting stepfather – is a bit too exploitative for such a half-assed horror flick to get away with.

With “Gothika,” Dark Castle Pictures (“House on Haunted Hill,” “Thirteen Ghosts” and “Ghost Ship”), the horror production company of producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis, continues its apparent mission to disgrace the horror genre on a yearly basis.

Thanks a lot, guys.