Eye Candy #18 - "The Orphanage"

The Orphanage: I’ve said it before many times and I’ll say it again: there ain’t nothing scarier on film than dead children. Seriously. Think of any movie you can with dead children in it, whether it be “The Shining”, “The Devil’s Backbone”, “Feardotcom”, et al., there are no “good” children ghosts, in the sense that they all function on their own plane of morality (more amoral than evil, but that’s still disturbing). Some are downright malevolent, don’t get me wrong (“come play with us forever…forever…”, you get my drift). Throw in some of the spookier aspects of “Peter Pan”, for flavor. Produced by Guillermo “Muerto Los Ninos” Del Toro, “The Orphanage” is the story of a building of that type located in Spain haunted by the ghost of six dead children, one of whom was horribly deformed. It seems that the children like to play. They take something from you, leave clues to find it, and then they grant you a wish when they do. When Laura (herself an orphan), her husband, and adopted son Simon move back into the building, the children take a shine to Simon and when he disappears, it may very well be that Laura is losing her mind. But the children aren’t done playing…Strong in the gloom and atmosphere department, not gory per se, but definitely chilling. A well-made film, it just lacked a certain ‘oomph’ to really put it over the top, and the ending seemed cribbed from “Dark Water“. Woodchuck sez, “Good, but I was hoping for a bit more.”