It does a man good to know that out there on the barren plains of Hollywood, some folks are sitting down for to watch shit like Ju-On or Kairo or even those Lord Of The Ring's and thinking something other than "Man, wouldn't this be great if only there were more Caucasians and less subtitles?"

It appears that the whole realisation that, pretty much, those Asian cats are making the best horror flicks right about now, might be influencing Hollywood in areas other than the ones where folks sit about acquiring remake rights and such.

For sure, we've still got stuff like the Dark Water remake coming up (a flick that, let's be honest here, wasn't really that much of a "horror" in the first place), but if maybe you were wanting to see a western horror flick that owes a lot to the Koreans or the Japanese without copying and pasting the plot wholesale, then what The Duke would do is point you in the direction of White Noise.

What White Noise concerns itself with is the E.V.P, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Back in the days of The Duke's Youth, shit like that right there used to scare The Child Duke fuckless, is what. The notion that a detuned radio or telly might be transmitting messages in-between the fuzz and the static, that right there was enough to ensure that The Duke turned the damn thing off every night, for fear of falling asleep and waking up to a screen-full of static and a loada hushed gibberish about "The Duke… Motherfucking… Dunst Is Waiting… Fucking…. Duke De…. Ooooh" and so on.

White Noise deals with exactly this sorta tomfoolery. What occurs is that Michael Keaton's wife dies, and all a sudden there's a fella telling him that she's been sending him messages through the telly. Obviously Keaton laughs this off and never thinks about it ever again, and then the flick follows him through his career as a business man of some sort, eventually succumbing to intense cocaine abuse and then dying with his willy out in the middle of a car-park.

Or it might do, if it was maybe directed by Scorsese, but no, Keaton takes a scene or two for to laugh it all off, and then, instead of laughing, goes and checks out what this old coot has to say. Things get progressively spookier, more disturbingly eerie and such, and even Deborah Kara Unger of Davey Cronenberg's Sex With Automobiles gets involved.

And really, you can't blame Keaton for following it up. The chance to have a conversation with a deceased loved-one, that chance right there doesn't come along too often, I'm guessing. He probably lies awake most nights thinking of stuff he shoulda said, stuff he shouldn't a said, stuff he maybe would've said if only she had said something other than what she did back that time in the bath. All sorts a conversational avenues he wishes to God he had explored. Now he can, and all with the aid of nothing more diabolical than a detuned Samsung.