Crimson Peak (2015)

I can't say I'm a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro's films across the board, but I did dig "Pan's Labyrinth" and I vaguely remember "The Devil's Backbone" being alright, but it's been years since I saw it. The rest of his most recent credits are attached to all sorts of "Pacific Rim" and "Hobbit" shit that I could give a rat's ass about. "Crimson Peak" was one I figured I'd watch eventually, seeing as how, again, I enjoyed "Pan's Labyrinth", and was moderately interested in seeing how the self-professed horror fanatic would 'spin' the ever-dwindling mainstream approach to the genre. In all, I wasn't all that impressed...

The daughter of a wealthy capitalist falls in love with an English inventor and the two move to England's countryside after her father's mysterious murder. While waiting for dead daddy's money to arrive, they move into her new husband and his nutty sister's childhood mansion where he's attempting to break into the clay mining business. While there, his new bride starts seeing ghoulish apparitions lurking around the halls and rooms, giving way to a violent background involving the strange siblings.

Visually, "Crimson Peak" is as lavish looking as you would expect from del Toro, but as it turns out, this only goes so far in keeping the movie engaging. Being a supernatural period piece gave it potential, I thought, and a slower pace CAN add to a tense build, but this flick gives in to the same overuse of CGI that almost all these types of ghost/haunting-themed films do these days. And every effect is so up front and in-your-face that all you can do is laugh at the cartoonish, digitized obnoxiousness. One scene contains a homage to "The Shining" that has all the subtlety of a Mack truck barrel rolling through an artillery range and the creepiness of a Saturday morning cartoon (which it looked like...). That, on top of the characters being extremely dull and the story feeling somewhat disjointed made "Crimson Peak" just hard to get 'into'.

The film comes across as exactly what it is: a horror flick made by a guy long marred by studio influence and giant robot movies whom everyone seems to mistake for a visionary.