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‘Shutter Island’: Is Scorsese hitting the grind-house circuit?

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You know when you hear someone say in a threatening tone of voice that ‘You can never leave this island!’ that you are in natural-born horror-movie territory.

That seems to be the message behind the new Paramount trailer for ‘Shutter Island’ that just went up on the Web. The film is loaded with A-list talent, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese, but the vibe of the trailer seems to be: Don’t expect anything too personal, this is still a genre-film thrill ride. It’s pretty obvious what Paramount is going for, in terms of commercial appeal, since the studio is opening the movie on Oct. 2, basically the same date that Warners used for the release of ‘The Departed,’ Scorsese’s Oscar-winning crime film of 2006.

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Scorsese began his career making genre films -- his 1972 film, ‘Boxcar Bertha,’ which starred Barbara Hershey and the late David Carradine, was a low-low-budget project for Roger Corman. He’s returned to the form on occasion, with mixed results, depending on how much you liked seeing Robert De Niro chew the scenery in ‘Cape Fear.’ So it’s hardly a surprise to see Scorsese in grind-house mode again. My suspicion is that the studio is playing up the genre elements of the story, figuring die-hard Scorsese fans (like me) will go see the film anyway, even if most of his personal touches are missing from the footage in the trailer.

The film is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (a wonderful crime fiction writer who also penned ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Gone Baby Gone’), so there’s still hope that there’s more here than meets the eye. The story is pretty straightforward, about two U.S. marshals investigating the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane located on a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts. That certainly feels like fertile thriller territory. But the trailer is way too pulpy for its own good, overloaded with all sorts of spooky, gothic touches and way too much cornball plot exposition.

The mental hospital is only supposed to have 66 patients, yet there is apparently an extra crazy person on the loose, inspiring this response: ‘So, Rachel Solando is suggesting that you have a 67th patient, doctor.’ I know that audiences need to be told everything these days, but does Leonardo DiCaprio really have to say: ‘Lots of people know about this place, but no one will talk -- it’s like they’re scared or something.’ Trust me, we got the point from all of the images of barbed-wire fences and shreds of paper falling from the sky. It feels like overkill or, more likely, a studio trailer that has been over-tested with moviegoers too dim to understand a good thriller storyline.

But here, see for yourself:

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