White Noise -- 2005 -- PG-13

Wow, I watched a movie AND I'm writing about it. Can you believe it? Well, it's been a little while now, and it's high time I started in on one of my favorite hobbies: commenting about the movies I've seen.

Here we have White Noise, which is a PG-13 "horror" flick out of the recent rash of J-horror spin-offs. While I don't know if this was based on a Japanese movie, it has some of the same shock moments we've come to expect, but not quite the level of constant dread the J-horrors tend to bring out.

The story here is about a man who loses his young wife in a mysterious accident where she disappears for five weeks before turning up dead after being apparently washed away by the tide. During this bit, he runs across the obligatory crazy guy who raves about being contacted by his wife and he knew she was dead before she turned up, which leads our distraught husband to seek out crazy guy in curiosity after receiving momentary contact from his late wife.

The crazy touts a known phenomenon known as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenemena, which is conveniently defined at the beginning of the film to help set us up), and just when you think it's somewhat interesting, yet creepy, we get zinged with a real shocker: did that static get all corporeal on us for a moment there? The real mystery begins about halfway in once our guy meets up with Mr. Crazy which is a bit long.

While the film offers some good shock moments, and a handful of suspense, it sets up a few mysteries and never resolves them. Without being a spoiler, we get zinged pretty good in the climax, and then not given a good resolution leaving us to wonder what was REALLY going on during this whole thing. Was there a point? Was there a plan? Was our lead meant to be in all this or was it an accident? All these unanswered questions served to hurt the ending of a halfway decent film for me.

Beyond this, it was decent enough. The lead had a good pain to feed off of and lead him through the film. There were enough curiosities to keep me interested. In fact, it was not a bad film at all except for the slew of unresolved issues we finally ended with. It might at least make you look at the static in your TV a little differently if you don't have one of those modern jobs that just goes to blue.