Red Eye Year: 2005 Director: Wes Craven Written by: Carl Ellsworth Threat: Terrorist Weapon of Choice: Pen IMDb page:

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Rish's Reviews
I don't know if you saw the original teaser for Red Eye, but it was very clever, set up like a Romantic Comedy trailer, with girl-of-the-month Rachel McAdams meeting cute with Cillian Murphy not once, not twice, but thrice. And just as you're expecting to hear The Turtles' Happy Together start playing, Murphy's eyes glow red and "A Wes Craven film" comes onscreen. It was really a cool trailer, and it worked well: this girl who we like oh-so-much is on a plane, sitting next to a demon, or even the Devil himself!
Of course the real film of Red Eye is nothing like that, as revealed by later trailers (which, as most seem to nowadays, revealed WAY too much about the film, from beginning to end), and the story is basically that cute-but-damaged Lisa (Rachel McAdams) meets cute with familiar-looking Cillian Murphy, then, once she's sitting next to him on a plane, she discovers that he is part of a terrorist plan to wipe out a government official. Only Lisa can help him achieve his goal, so he's got an assassin ready to take out Lisa's daddy (good old Brian Cox, the Peter Cushing of our day*) if she doesn't cooperate. She has no one she can turn to, and time is running out on this late night flight, where turbulence and a little blond first time flyer are the least of her worries.
I had to ask The Question all the way home from this one. Was it Horror? And the truth is, you could argue it either way. Since I'm typing this up, you can guess which way I went. And it wasn't really the plot, the unstoppable killer angle, or the fact that it'll be filed under Horror in the video store that decided me. It was the director. Wes Craven can make a dozen Music of the Hearts, he's always gonna be the Horror guy to you and me.
And hey, the movie isn't half bad. There are a couple of unsuccessful moments and some hard-to-swallow contrivances, but after the disaster that was Craven's last film, this was a nice change. And I liked it a lot more than the even-less-plausable Flightplan that came out around the same time.
Both Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams are really, really good, and they have to be, since most of the film is just the two of them acting opposite each other. McAdams cries really well, and Murphy is quite menacing, in a pretty likeable way. I appreciated that the main character was really intelligent, trying things to get out of her situation that we might try too, rather than just stupidly sitting there or succumbing to the contrived ineffectiveness movie characters tend to have in situations like hers. Also, unlike the aforementioned Flightplan, I could actually see someone doing what McAdams does, more or less.
The scenes leading up to the plane ride aren't great, and the scenes after the plane are even weaker, but for a good hour there, this is a tight, well-paced, tense, and engrossing Suspense film. Wes Craven has directed far better movies, but this one seems much more universal than his Horror stuff. If I had to compare his work here to anyone else's, it would have to be Hitchcock's. This is the kind of movie he might have made, had he lived thirty years longer.
I'd Recommend It To: Fans of scary plane movies and/or Psychological Th . . . well, you know.
*Or is he the Vincent Price of our day?
Posted: December 27, 2005

Total Skulls: 11

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?