Bovie Movie

You die on screen playing the prototype video game Staying Alive, then you prepare to meet the same bloody fate in real life. This is the premise of William Brent Bell’s predictable The Ring-goes-X Box chiller, which is set against the over-familiar horror landscape of New Orleans and centres on the quest of a group of friends to find the ancient evil that has possessed their consoles. That the police ignore the group’s crazy explanation despite clear evidence; that lovers make out amid the supernatural mayhem; and that characters utter lines such as “I can’t believe this is happening!”, only adds to the lame-brained, clichéd ennui. Pre-gore cutaways (to secure a wider audience) sink any shock value, while the sound effects — reliant on joystick controls buzzing like an electric razor — are lazy. Even the game’s computer graphics refuse to summon up the requisite gothic frisson. 

With this messy tale of teen horror, director Wes Craven tries to reinvigorate the werewolf movie in the same way that his Scream series breathed life into the jaded slasher genre. The film stars Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg (Roger Dodger) as LA siblings who are infected by a lycanthrope after a road accident. The events that follow, as the two slowly begin to transform, aren’t so much scary as darkly amusing, with scriptwriter Kevin Williamson’s adolescent witticisms and whines to the fore. The first third of the movie is like TV’s The O.C. with added gore and light tension, giving the film an enjoyably breezy appeal that masks its surprisingly clumsy direction and ridiculous storyline. It’s only when the werewolf effects go from a teasing flash of fur to full-frontal monsters that the feature disintegrates entirely. The CGI effects are so appalling that they overshadow everything else, spoiling the creepy fun and turning a guilty pleasure into groan-worthy rubbish.