Went to see the new horror film The Other Side of the Door – another forgettable by-the-numbers jump scare horror movie. I can give it a touch of credit for a couple things – mainly it looks good and has good lightning. Everything else is largely a fail – it’s not scary, the attempts at horror are based on random events in the script pretty much there to fill time, and it’s highly unoriginal.

There is one original thing, I guess, and that this is a film about an American family living in India. So it looks like it’s filmed on location so we can revel in the Mysterious East, what with all the Indian mysticism to freak out our American family. Ooogie boogie, I guess. I’d say it’s vaguely insensitive to the culture… others would eliminate the vaguely part.

As far as the story goes, the couple lose their boy in a traffic accident and their Indian nanny/house servant tells the mom that she can perform a ceremony and go to this abandoned temple, knock on the door, and say goodbye to her son. When the wife does this and opens the door she should not open, the ghost of the boy comes out and the nanny is horrified (what did you think was going to happen, lady, you sent her to the ancient temple alone?). The thing is, at first, the wife and her daughter aren’t all that surprised the ghost of the boy starts to haunt them… until they find out he is EVIL! EVIL I tell ya! And a creeping crawling ghost that looks like it was borrowed from a Japanese movie starts delivering jump scares (I think she was an evil spirit of the dead or maybe a god of the dead? Who knows). And there’s an evil tiger stuff animal… more jump scares.

The sad thing is, when the movie ends, I realized this was just a remake of Pet Semetary… only with a ghost boy instead of a zombie boy. Hell, in both stories, they both went to an ancient Indian burial ground… only one was Native Americans and the other was, you know, Indian. Even the twist-type ending was the same.

I’m about done typing about this generic horror movie. Only moment I can credit is that it looks good and I was only mildly bored so I guess there was some decent film making to this wholly unoriginal script full of cheap jump scares that fill time before the movie’s dumb ending.

Score: 62