In my opinion, the horror genre has been pretty sucky since the 1950’s. Really, I don’t see how you can have a scary movie without cat people or The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Hollywood has gotten all obsessed with J-Horror and has been ripping off the Japanese fright style just like it ripped off the Hong Kong action movie fight choreography. They recently have gotten into the practice of begging some A-List actress to play the lead in this type of movie so that it seems “legit”. In this case they hired Princess Pouty herself, Renee Zellweger. I know this has been pointed out before, but Renee Zellweger looks like she is constantly sucking on a lemon. Perhaps her salivary glands produce lemon juice instead of saliva. That would be unfortunate, if true. Anyway, in Case 39, she plays a social worker who tries to save a little girl from her neglectful parents. As dictated by the formula, Zellweger is the last to know that it is actually the little girl who is evil. The parents are just trying to do the socially responsible thing by ridding the world of their sinister spawn. Of course, the little girl is evil/magic, and killing her doesn’t turn out to be so easy. She busies herself with the standard J-Horror creepy kid-type stuff, such as crawling on the ceiling like a bug, opening her mouth excessively wide, and twisting her body into unnatural positions. This behavior makes the girl invulnerable to croquette mallets, lawn darts, and paint cans, which happen to be the only things her parents have around the house to use as weapons. A priest is called, but his holy water has the unhappy side effect of making the girl gigantic and giving her tentacles lined with razor suction cups. The destructive rampage finally comes to an end when Zellweger serves the little girl/monster pancakes for the first time. It turns out the little girl’s evilness was the direct result of a sugar deficiency. Perhaps you’ll think that I have spoiled the movie by giving away the ending, but this is not the case. I have not told you what kind of pancakes were used! Anyway, I think the whole “J-Horror creepy kid” thing is pretty played out. If Hollywood really wants to terrify an audience, they need to make a J-Horror Creepy Kid vs. The Creature From the Black Lagoon movie. Now that would be somethin’!
