Remaking horror movies is always a gamble, but the producers of the English-language versions of The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water are obviously hoping that most western eyes have not come across 2004’s Thai spine-tickler Shutter.

As far as making money is concerned, it’s a sensible assumption. But creatively, it’s an utterly pointless exercise – the mystery has been revealed and you can’t surprise audiences with the same scare twice.

Predictably, the law of diminishing returns applies to this leaden-footed rehash which tramples over the same shocks, twists and turns without recapturing a shred of the suspense.

Joshua Jackson – the chap they call when Tobey Maguire, Elijah Wood and Jake Gyllenhaal are sleeping – plays Ben, a fashion photographer whose work takes him to Japan mere days after his marriage to willowy blonde Jane (Transformers star Taylor).

The honeymoon is officially over when Jane runs over a woman on a dark forest road outside Tokyo. When the dazed couple come to, their victim has disappeared.

But while Ben dives into his assignment, Jane cannot put the accident out of her mind. Her worries multiply when all her tourist snaps come out with strange, ghostly marks on them.

“Spirit photographs!” chirps Ben’s gorgeous assistant. “My ex-boyfriend works at a spirit photography magazine!” Handy, that.

The ex-boyfriend turns out to be Ando from Heroes (James Kyson Lee), who may wish that his pal Hiro had been around to stop time when he signed up for this thankless gig.

Anyhow, Ben starts to take Jane’s crazy notions more seriously when all the pictures from his photoshoot are ruined in the same way. But then this is a professional photographer who doesn’t use the flash when using disposable cameras indoors.

(And while we’re on the subject, Jane - unlike every other digital camera user in the world - waits to come home before checking her snapshots.)

Suddenly, the phantom girl is popping up everywhere – in pictures, in reflections, in dreams, and in the apartments of Ben’s shifty colleagues (David Denman and John Hensley - the Michael Jackson lookalike from Nip/Tuck). Bad things happen to the latter.

And therein lies the mystery. To give away any more would normally spoil the fun but director Ochiai and first-time screenwriter Luke Dawson manage that perfectly well by themselves.

Where the original reached some genuine hair-raising highs, Ochiai’s idea of scary is to have Ben and Jane constantly creep up on one another and to focus long and hard on, let’s see, how about an empty chair? Wooooh!

Dawson’s dialogue, meanwhile, splutters between people-never-talk-like-that exposition and unintentional guffaws (Jackson deserves an award for keeping a straight face during his final exchanges).

What’s wrong with this picture? They took the lens cap off.

Elliott Noble