The Eye 2 (Gin gwai 2) (2004) • Hong Kong • Pang Bros.

Typical Pang Brothers: inventive camera-work, thoughtful sound design, well constructed scenes, a few jolts, and a story line that mixes fantasy, flashbacks, hallucinations and dreams with some present tense reality and impossible events (like jumping pregnant off a building roof and ending up with only a few scratches and a healthy baby). Call it a script.

No secret that the Pang Brothers have their own personal logic and/or they can't be bothered with cohesiveness to their stories as long as there's a general thrust of somebody doing something questionable so that the scaries can come after them until they fess up in some ambiguous way. I don't care. They do everything else well enough for me to enjoy their films.

A big pleasant surprise is anorexic super-model Shu Qi nails her part. She is beautiful and convincing.

There is no reason for this film to be called EYE 2 except for capitalizing on the success of the original EYE which dealt specifically with a blind person getting an eye transplant from ... drum roll please ... someone who didn't die right--the basis of most Asian horror--so they haunt until a remedy is found.

I'm pretty sure Shu Qi has 20/20 vision in this movie, but she is messing around with a married guy which causes his wife to commit suicide (she doesn't die properly) and comb her hair over her face, like a good Asian horror girl should, so she can effectively haunt the nasty mistress who is pregnant with her cheating husband's child.

The MIA husband of some other pregnant girl also haunts our heroine for some reason. I dunno.

They don't show it but at one point Shu Qi practically bites the face off some other guy. That was fun to think about.

★★★★

No comments:

Post a Comment