Sunday, September 12, 2010

Nicole Kidman can be one scary lady

(This post was originally meant for Friday, but an internet outage in our neck of the woods kept me from posting it until today.)

I scratched another Saturn Award winner for Best Horror Movie off of my list of movies to watch yesterday, and this time around, it was the 2001 winner, “The Others.”

Many of you will remember this creepy movie. It starred Nicole Kidman and Eric Sykes.

This movie is about a mother and her two children who live in a large English manor house on the island of Jersey, a British Crown Dependency. The film takes place just after World War II.

The mother, played by Nicole Kidman, spends much of her time taking care of her two children, who have an uncommon disease that makes them allergic to sunlight. Her husband is absent from the house and is believed to have been killed in action during the war.

One day, three servants come to the house, they say in response to a newspaper ad, looking for work. And that’s when things start to get really weird. (I’ll stop right there, so as not to spoil the rest of the movie for those of you who haven’t seen it.)

Most people don’t know that this movie, while in English, is actually a Spanish movie. The script was written by Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar in Spanish and was later translated into English. Released in September 2001, the film went on to become Spain’s highest grossing domestic movie ever ($209,700,000) and is the highest grossing Spanish film in the all-time worldwide box office history. This was also the first movie to ever receive a Best Film Award at the Goyas (Spain’s national film awards) with not a single word of Spanish spoken in the entire movie.

This movie is also notable because Tom Cruise, who was then married to leading lady Nicole Kidman, was the movie’s executive producer. This movie marked their last collaboration together prior to their much publicized divorce. In fact, their divorce was finalized the same week that “The Others” was released to theatres.

In the end, it was a lot of fun rewatching this creepy movie. From here, it’s on to the 2002 winner, “The Ring.” I actually have a copy of “The Ring” at home, so I won’t have to wait on NetFlix to deliver it to the house.

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