Dark Water came too late for its own good. Though the original was pretty solid, and the remake had its moments, its timing was so far off that the end result couldn’t help but be unmarkable.

The Wrong Time

What you really have to understand about Dark Water was its place in the timeline that was imports and remakes. Starting with The Ring based on the Japanese Ringu and pretty much peaking with The Grudge based on Ju-On, Dark Water was at the end of a long, long string of remakes. By that point, people stopped caring, and the remake flood began to lose steam.

Not That It Was Completely Silenced, You Know

Okay, so it’s coming back. Wes Craven managed to get a good one off doing Pulse, managing to couple his total lack of subtlety with the absolute subtlety of Japanese filmmaking to make a whole that was actually not half bad. Especially when viewed objectively as part of Wes Craven’s career. This is the guy who managed to bring us not one but four installments of The Hills Have Eyes. If you count the remakes. Plus, One Missed Call, which becomes part of the January No-One-Cares block, looks to be at least halfway decent. But only time will tell on that one.

However, we don’t need to wait for the test of time on Kwanzoo, where Dark Water movie trivia questions await. That’s one call you don’t want to miss!

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