Gothika: Critic Reviews

This overripe grade-C reconstitution of a grade-B scary thriller hauls out thunderstorms, blood, the ghosts of butchered girls, nightmares, and the usual head trips.

It is a thoroughly synthetic confection, compounded of cliches drawn from a half-dozen genres and subgenres that for a while might almost persuade its audience, as it apparently convinced its makers, that it is something more.

The movie is on the cheesy side.

Scriptwriter Sebastian Gutierrez and French director Mathieu (Hate) Kassovitz ... treat this movie with all the subtlety of a Judas Priest music video.

Propelled by too many whoppers to create a believable, and therefore legitimately terrifying, universe.

A desperate frenzy of cheap thrills.

All horror tropes, please report for duty.

No scene goes underplayed, no performance (save one, from Robert Downey Jr.) lacks volume, no horror cliche is forgotten.

The film has suspense and enough well-done jolts to satisfy the folks who go to movies for those sorts of things, but the more the story wades into the supernatural, the sillier it gets.

A parade of cheap scare tactics.

Stumbles in so many spots that it's even difficult to champion a claim for Berry being the best thing about it.

In trash as in art there is no accounting for taste, and reader, I cherished this movie in all of its lurid glory.

Plays out on screen as a series of crazy chases and lady-in-distress cliches, interspersed with wildly illogical plot twists-all caught by a nervous camera whirling like drunken paparazzi.

For those who want nothing more than a thorough scare, Gothika is effective. But for those of us who want some psychological insight with our frightfests, the film is sadly lacking.

The horror-thriller Gothika gets an A for presentation, a C+ for story and an F for dialogue.

It's sure, scary stuff, and fans of heart palpitations will likely find themselves pleased.

Provides a decent number of thrills and chills, but it wilts before the payoff.

Kassovitz ... seems totally oblivious to how silly this all gets.

A mystery wrapped in an enigma -- an enigma that isn't nearly as clever as the screenwriter seems to think it is.

It's a film about the mind that is totally bone-headed, frequently making serious lapses of logic.

Exercise in mediocrity.

More of a women's-prison movie than a supernatural thriller, and not a very good one at that.

There's nothing worse than watching an involving motion picture collapse into rubble before your eyes, and that's exactly what happens here.

After a seductive start, it all becomes an empty swirl of smoke and mirrors -- or, in this case, flickering fluorescent bulbs and icy glass.