Gothika
''Gothika,'' the ridiculous new Halle Berry movie, fancies itself a horror chiller. For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.
Berry plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a prison shrink who somehow finds herself locked up in the very penitentiary psych ward that's also her place of work. Apparently, she's murdered her tubby husband and boss, Doug (Charles S. Dutton) during one of the movie's endless rainy nights.
Miranda has no memory of her crime. But her friend and co-worker, Dr. Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.), assures her that indeed she did pick up an ax and swing it over and over. So the intrigue persists. Why would Miranda chop her husband into a half-dozen chunks? How could she do that and not remember? And what does Halle Berry have to do to get in a sane, safe on-screen relationship?
But while we wait for the movie to figure it all out, Miranda is put through the movie's obstacle course of loony-bin battiness. For starters, she sees dead people, chiefly the damp, shivering body of a girl who killed herself four years ago. Miranda thinks she sees the girl in solitary confinement. She thinks she sees her in her dreams, and -- most opportunistically by the filmmakers -- she thinks she sees her in the shower. Apparently the girl wants Miranda's help, but honestly, is knocking her around her cell any way to ask for it?
The movie, written by Sebastian Gutierrez and made by the French director and movie star Mathieu Kassovitz, is a desperate frenzy of cheap thrills. It can't make you jump and make sense without wearing itself out, so the movie settles for playing ''gotcha'' instead. The camera is eager to point out all clues, just like that kid in class who knows the answer to everything. The strings in John Ottman's score are rubbed so violently they could be used to start campfires. And look out for the owl that's been dispatched to make you leap out of your seat.
But the casting of an unhinged Penelope Cruz might also make you jump. She plays a murderous, overmedicated patient of Miranda's who describes sex with the devil this way: ''He opened me like a flower of pain, and it felt goooood.'' Why have mental illness, the supernatural, and the soapy business of a women's prison drama converged in a single Halle Berry vehicle whose title sounds like the name of the loudest rock band in Eastern Europe?
Berry is too willing to do everything in this movie -- from wearing a terrible fright wig to wearing almost nothing several times. This is a D-list starlet's movie, something that should have ended up in Denise Richards's lap.
Berry's not a bad actress; she's just not a very imaginative one. Here she cries and shrieks up a storm. But that's about all she does. Watching her throw herself into this nothing part is like watching a bodybuilder throw his back out to lift a stapler. You're terrified that if Berry doesn't die of embarrassment, she'll pass out from overexertion.
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