“He opened me like a flower of pain, and it felt gooooood.” It takes a mad genius – or a screenwriter of amazingly misplaced chutzpah – to begin a movie with a line as florid and purple as that.

Robert Downey Jr. and Halle Berry are two Hollywood giants with several decades of films under their belts. In the early 2000s, the two actors starred together in the supernatural horror film Gothika.

Halle Berry's natural radiance and spectacular bone structure are largely hidden in "Gothika," a horror thriller of the "Don't Go in There" subgenre and a pastiche of other, better movies. Her face ...