“Fragile”

I haven’t been watching any horror flicks ever since Regine was born - due to the fact that our TV has been declared an off limit item after 8pm, and I can’t haul my ass to the cinema either, since I am always needed around to clean up the shits and pukes of my infant daughter. So, I didn’t have any choice but to watch it only after my Regine was asleep last night, and for the first time in many months, I laid my eyes on a rather outdated horror flick which goes by the title “Fragile”.

A low budget movie starring Calista Flockhart, you know, that ugly emaciated girl who got her fame from that Ally McBeal role? Yes, she’s the protagonist of this flick (just a word of note, I’ve never watched that McBeal crap before… just in case you’re wondering…). And for such a low budget making, I’d cut this flick some slack and give it a mediocre rating instead. So, yeah, why not?

The story’s about this nurse, Amy (Flockhart), who got a temporary job taking care of a bunch children at an old hospital. The kids were the remaining patients that were supposed to move out from the building to another premise, but due to a recent train crash that caused a shortage of hospital beds around the region, the transfer had to be delayed till everything’s back to normal again. But it didn’t… for the hospital was haunted. And Amy found out about it the hard way. She would first sit through her shift noting something weird happening around the hospital and like many hundreds of other horror flicks seemed to like to portray, she’d find out more about it from the kids, about Charlotte the ‘Mechanical girl’ (which was supposed to be the ghost).

I don’t know about that but, they could have given ‘it’ a better name, you know, like maybe ‘Bloody Brain Sucker’… ‘Charlotte the Mutilator’… or something… But anyway, that ‘Mechanical girl’, seemed to be a topic of interest to the troubled Amy, and a subject that many of her fellow hospital colleagues would not discuss with her. But the haunting eventually became more audacious and threatening, that Amy had to do something about it. She decided to investigate (instead of peel the fuck off and never turn back), and found out more about this Charlotte ghost…

Apparently this Charlotte ghost, wasn’t the ‘Mechanical girl’ as Amy had originally thought it was. That ‘Mechanical girl’ was called Mandy, who used to be one of the children nursed inside the hospital aeons ago for some rare bone disease. And there was this fugly nurse, which was the actual Charlotte, who developed a very deep affection towards Mandy back then. Soon Mandy got well enough to leave the hospital, but Charlotte didn’t like the idea. As a result, Charlotte orchestrated an evil plot to prevent Mandy from leaving, by fracturing her bones to paint a facade that her condition’s worsening and needed to stay in the hospital longer. That’s how Mandy got the name - ‘Mechanical girl’ - ’cause she had all these metal braces supporting her fractured bones, thanks to Charlotte the psychotic nurse.

But Charlotte went a bit too far one day, and got Mandy killed. Overwhelmed by extreme sadness, she killed herself and turned into a motherfucking badass ghost. So, all along the story, the haunting was of that Charlotte’s, not ‘Mechanical girl’ aka Mandy’s. Charlotte became violent because she doesn’t want the childrens to be brought away from her one more time, and that was why she went apeshit about the whole thing and resurrected her old time hobby - breaking bones.

It was a mildly creepy movie with diggable plot, but lacked of the ’scare factor’. The scariest thing of all was probably Charlotte the ghost herself, which only appeared almost at the finale of the flick and only for a brief moment. She has this creepy looking face that very much reminded me one of my nasty school teachers (which I’ve blogged about as ‘Miss Lim’ here) and… you probably wouldn’t believe this but, Charlotte was half naked. Her rack was like, hanging out. This… this… set of ultra saggy tits that have more wrinkles per square inch than an entire box (jumbo pack) of dehydrated prunes combined… bouncing menacingly across the screen like… like… it’s gonna spoil my sex life. It’s horrifying man. The tits.

And that Calista girl wasn’t very good either. She looked so very fake when she does that flip out scene. They could just get a porn star to play the role Amy, and it would have been any way better than Calista Flockhart. And that, we get to see some flesh, to offset that Charlotte’s horrifying indecent exposure…

Maybe I should become a director instead of an engineer…