Secret Window (7/10)

Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is a writer suffering from writer’s block. He’s also going through a terrible divorce after finding his gorgeous wife, Amy (Maria Bello), in bed with Ted Milner (Timothy Hutton). Suddenly psychopathic Shooter (John Turturro) shows up on his doorstep out in the middle of nowhere (naturally; where else would a Stephen King thriller be set?) claiming that Mort stole his story. Shooter gives him a copy of the manuscript but Mort claims his story was published several years earlier in a magazine. Mort can’t get rid of the guy as Shooter gets more and more bizarre and strange things start happening in and around Mort’s house. Mort hires private eye Ken Karsch (Charles S. Dutton) to try and help him with Shooter.

Not only have I never read anything written by Stephen King, I’ve not seen any of the movies based on his work because I’m not a devotee of his frightening/horror genre. So this was an initiation for me, and I liked it. Even though I had the story pegged right from the start, I still enjoyed it. It’s tense and ominous , but not so frightful that you have to close your eyes or turn away. Written and directed by David Koepp, this is an entertaining, albeit scary, movie, interspersed with comedic touches and atmospheric music and locales.

March 10, 2004

The End

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