Coming hot on the spurs of break-out hit The Orphanage, Spanish horror continues its revival with deeply derivative but highly enjoyable horror, Shiver. A photosensitive sprog, like the one in The Others, moves to a town with a dirty secret, like the one in Bad Day At Black Rock, to live in a house where violent wrongs have occurred, like the one in Stir of Echoes. Wrongs that have produced a violent, avenging kid, like the one in the Ring and Grudge movies, who starts murdering teenagers, like the ones in almost every other horror movie you’ve ever seen. It’s up to our daylight-phobic protagonist to uncover the town’s secret history and stop the killing. Despite the fact that the plot reads like a Smorgasboard of characters and incidents from the past ten years of horror movies, the film succeeds by its reluctance to take itself too seriously and its relentless, cracking pace that subverts the traditional notion that suspense movies have to move slow to build tension. This one’s worth checking out if it receives the broad release it deserves.
Comments