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Skeleton Key, The

Man, I hate it when I'm right. Wait, no that's not correct. I love it when I'm right. Yeah, that's it. I love that feeling of superiority and dominance. Call it arrogance if you will, but there's nothing greater than knowing that I, indeed, possess grand knowledge that I can lord over others. What the hell am I talking about? The Skeleton Key. A few weeks ago, I bitched and moaned about the ad campaign for this "horror" movie.

Claiming it's the return of the great psychological thriller, with an ending that will have you talking for days, etc. I mentioned about how I bet it was just another average run of the mill PG-13 movie that has a bunch of theme park thrills but is ultimately unsatisfying. Let me tell you something, I hit it right on the nose. You may be thinking "Oh, he set himself up to think this way, so naturally his opinion was determined before the projectionist even hit start." I'm not like that.

I go in with a clear mind (well, mostly clear, I did have a beer before the flick to take the edge off). I wanted to enjoy the flick, I really did. I did want to be proven wrong. I wanted this movie to blow me away. And halfway through the movie, when I called "ending that's so shocking" I realized that this movie wasn't going to be a great find. Just something that I've seen before. Skeleton Key tells the story of Caroline (Kate Hudson), a hospice nurse who is tired of watching patients die in such an uncaring health care system. She's 25, and wants a little change in her life. (We know this, because she blatantly announces it. More of that later). So she answers an ad in the paper for a caretaker position in the Louisiana swamps, taking care of stroke victim Ben (John Hurt).

Ben's wife, Violet (Gena Rowlands) is also in the house, rather sad that her soul mate is leaving, and kind of untrusting of this new woman in her house. They live in a spooky old estate in the swamp, the kind where creepy things happen at every turn. Not like those old, bland, ancient estates. Just once, I'd like to see a horror movie that places it's characters in the spooky house and has nothing happen inside actual said house. Everything creepy would occur outside, and the spooky house would become haven of everything warm and safe. Except it would mysteriously have soup and hot chocolate ready. Ooooooooohhhhhhh........

See, that's thinking outside the box. Something this movie doesn't do. Anyway, Caroline is given a skeleton key (title) to the house, and she goes exploring in the creepy attic. In said attic, there are no lights. Not a good sign. But that doesn't stop our intrepid nurse from becoming junior private eye, and trying to crack the mystery of what happened to Ben in the attic that led to his stroke. Was it just a stroke, or something more... SCARY! Possibly involving "hoodoo" a form of magic. (Not to be confused with voodoo, I'll get into this later).

The rest of the story leads to giving away major plot points, which you know I'm kind of resolutely opposed to. Suffice it to say, if you pay attention, and have seen, I don't know ANY movies in your life, you can figure out where the story is headed WAY before the characters do. I didn't care for the flick too much. And I think the main problem is the script. It's not as obviously written from the twist backwards, as M. Night Shyamalan's scripts do, but it's very poorly written.

For example, aforementioned age proclamation. this is kind of a lazy tool of screenwriting, to let people know the kind of person we're dealing with. And we're dealing with a person who will outright state character traits. This is not how a normal person talks. Normal people (and good scripts) find clever ways to convey this kind of information. There's a lot of this in the flick, lots of outright expository dialog. It doesn't help that it's delivered quite poorly most of the time. The "hoodoo" explanation comes to mind. The only time it was delivered rather well was when Gena Rowlands explains the history of the house, but the visuals overlaid were too quickly cut, and reminded me of the scene in Ghost Ship where the little ghost girl explains what's going on. (Sensing a trend here?) Another thing, Kate Hudson's Caroline seems to have no other reason for pursuing this mystery other than that's what the script told her to do. Seriously, this bugged me. No decision she makes would be done by a rational human being. It's seriously difficult to believe a movie (who's major script point is about believing, it should be noted) where none of these characters act like human beings, as opposed to bland characters typed out of a keyboard. Oh, and for another fun drinking game, take a sip when someone says the word believe. The acting isn't anything to write home about.

Kate Hudson is pretty bland, even with a partial nude scene and lots of shots of her in her underwear. (My theory about this is she wanted to show off how good she looked after having a baby. Another critic pointed out she should have waited a bit longer). But she has very poor delivery of most of these lines. Gena Rowlands is a bit better for the first 2/3 of the movie, but turns into cliche in the last third. Peter Sarsgaard is sleepy eyed again, and not too interesting, much like in the upcoming Flight Plan. (When he likes the material, he's fantastic, but it feels like the studio work he does doesn't excite him). The best of the bunch is John Hurt, who's acting as a stroke victim. He's really good in what limited capacity he's used. There's nothing truly frightening in this film.

There are what I referred to before as theme park thrills. This is when something will suddenly jump out at you, and the soundtrack has a staccato burst of strings and horns, and the main character jumps out of the seat, and you're momentarily startled, and then you laugh about it the next second with the person sitting next to you. There's a lot of them in this movie, and in a lot of the recent horror films. But the main concept is not very frightening, or maybe I'm too jaded and need something even more freaky to slake my thirst. When the movie's in the house, all I could think about was that old Eddie Murphy comedy bit, about how black people would never be in a horror movie like this, or Amityville Horror. He starts off with the husband in the house "Wow, look at this house. This is great, kids are playing, wife is happy, everything's going great!"

Then Murphy adopts a freaky voice and says "GET OUT" and immediately says "Too bad we can't stay!" (It's much better to hear him do it, but hopefully I made my point clear). That's what watching this movie felt like. It's not a terrible film, but it's not a good one at all. But, it will take some money from teens this weekend who want to go and see the hip new horror film of the week. If only they'd see Devil's Rejects instead. Well, at least I was right about something. Here's hoping I'll be wrong about the next horror film.

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