Friday, Sept. 24, 11:30 p.m., Plaza
An American journalist (Cindy Sampson), her photographer boyfriend (Aaron Ashmore) and an intern (Meghan Heffern) set off to rural Poland to investigate a missing persons case. What they discover, though, is a cast of creepy characters in an eerie small town, made even more unsettling by the presence of a seemingly immovable fog bank in the nearby forest.
Director Jon Knautz provided goofy, reverential fun with his last outing, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, pushing the limits of good taste in the process. The Shrine, on the other hand, takes itself far too seriously; instead of breaking new ground, it shamelessly pillages its best moments. Arrogant yet doomed Americans in Eastern Europe? Sound like Hostel to me. A supernatural mist? The Fog, of course. And the list continues. The Shrine swipes iconography from The Exorcist, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and utilizes the ghostly cheap thrills of the J-horror canon in all manners. In a genre as played-out as horror, it’s hard to knock a movie for being derivative; blood-splattered cliché is the cornerstone of those films. Sadly, The Shrine moves beyond the safe bounds of homage into flat-out laziness and borderline plagiarism.
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