Foster on Film – Page 53 – The Film Criticism of Matthew M. Foster

Halloween 8: Resurrection (2002)

Oct 032002

Michael, still alive after his apparent beheading, travels back to Haddonfield to find a group of teens participating in a live Internet broadcast from his old home. Naturally, he starts killing them.

Hey, Michael did something new with his hair! I like it. Yes, Michael’s hairdo is the most interesting thing about this amateur schlock. At the end of the last “adventure,” Michael was finally killed for good by his sister. No tiny bullets or surface burns, he was beheaded. Let’s say that again. HIS HEAD WAS CUT OFF. Now, for most of us, that would be a detriment, but not for Michael or the producers of this waste of film stock. Apparently, Laurie accidentally beheaded someone else. Ooops. Michael has been reading War and Peace for three years, but now decides to come after his sis, and kills off the only reason to see the film before the opening credits.

Halloween: Resurrection does introduce one new concept, black people. There are non-Caucasians in the world. You’d never know that from the previous films. It also shows the differences in the races: white folks run or scream when they meet Michael, blacks fight back with street-styled martial arts. Ah, I do love it when filmmakers have such a strong grasp of race relations.

The other films in the series are Halloween, Halloween 2, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later.

Halloween, Reviews, Slashers Tagged with: Toxic

Blade II (2002)

Oct 022002

Blade (Wesley Snipes) teams up with a pack of vampires to stop the spread of a new type of undead that is a threat to humans and the old vampire order.

Quick Review: If you’ve seen Blade, you know what you are in for. The action is a bit faster, the monsters a bit scarier, and the jokes a bit funnier, so you have what a sequel should be. Director Guillermo del Toro was brought in to give the film an edge, always a problem for a sequel as the concept has now been used at least once. So he made his new vampires more frightening and put our heroes into confined places for a bit of tension. It worked.

Blade II is better than its predecessor, though not by much. While the FX has improved (again, just a bit), there are two horrible scenes, one where two vampires are fighting Blade in front of a bank of white lights, and they obviously become CGI, the other in a final duel with a Reaper vampire where a cartoonish FX wrestling move is made. Everything about the second is bad, and jerked me out of the film. As for the first, del Toro has stated his own disappointment with the effect. Otherwise, this is thoroughly fun adventure film. See it, like the first, because it’s cool.

It was followed by Blade: Trinity.

Reviews, Superhero, Vampires Tagged with: Three & 1/2 Reels

Repossessed (2002)

Sep 302002

Directed by: John Coven. Written by: John Coven, Cornell Christianson. Cast: JoBeth Williams, Juliet Landau. 8 min.

This critique contains spoilers – if you have not seen the film yet, go to the Best Shorts page.

There is a basic ghost story. This isn’t terribly surprising as a majority of sub-genres aren’t so much categories as they are the same story shot with varying perspectives or new twists. Count how many zombie films have a mismatched group of survivors fortified in a building as an ever-growing horde of zombies gather to eat their brains. For ghost stories—and I’m talking about horror-oriented haunting movies, not comedies or romances where helpful ghosts arrange dates for lonely widows—that basic plot is simple. The protagonist enters a haunted location or meets a haunted person. That hero, who appears to have nothing to do with the ghosts, discovers that someone is in great danger from the ghost and sets out to discover what event happened years earlier to cause the haunting. Armed with that information, the hero can confront the ghostly forces, at which point the ghost either leaves (happily or unhappily, depending on what was discovered) or it’s now clear that the ghost will never leave, and the people need to run away forever. The story has been told over and over in The Ghost Breakers, Ghost Story, The Uninvited, The Forgotten, and Poltergeist, to name just a few. For these films, being good isn’t a matter of being original, as none have been completely original for a very long time, but rather telling the story precisely, in a way which engages the emotions of the viewer. Something different and unexpected is a bonus and elevates films like The Ring and The Sixth Sense, but that new element must be added on to an accomplished telling of the basic tale, or it’s just a gimmick.

Repossessed doesn’t offer the viewer twists. A realtor finds herself in a haunted house, though it doesn’t appear that way at first. Everything is normal until the potential buyer begins to tell a story she’d heard about the house. It is soon obvious that she’s telling a ghost story. As the story reaches its most unsettling point, the realtor is surrounded by the bumps, creaks, and visions that indicate that somebody who’s dead isn’t laying still. It’s a compressed version of the basic story, as the person in danger is the realtor, and she is fed the answers instead of having to search for them, but the results are the same. And that is the wonder of Repossessed. It gives us THE ghost story, with the mystery, the slow buildup, the creepy feeling that you don’t want to look behind you, the straightforward frights, and the emotional impact, and all in eights minutes. What has been done in two hours, director John Coven fits into eight minutes, without missing a thing. The economy is breathtaking. That he manages character development is closing in on bizarre as few films manage actual character development in under thirty minutes.

All stories, in any form, including novels, plays, ballets, operas, or of course, movies, should be told in as brief a time as possible. It is one of the defining characteristics of a good story, that there be no empty moments. Now that doesn’t mean that all films should be short. If it takes four hours to reveal the plot and to state the theme, then four hours is how long the film should be. But if it could have been done in three hours, then there is an hour where no additional information is given, no insightful concepts are expressed, and no character development happens—that’s an hour that could be cut out. If the viewer needs to watch a character’s face, see it move ever so slightly, see the shadow and study the eyes, and do so for ten minutes to care about the character, to feel what that character is feeling, then ten minutes is perfect. But what if it could be done in eight minutes? If so, we’ve spent an extra two minutes gaining nothing of the emotional state of the character, and the impact has been diluted. Great film doesn’t make that mistake. Every second of the film is valuable. Repossessed takes it to a whole new level. The ghost story has somehow been placed in eight minutes. That means all those other films have an hour of unnecessary film stock clicking through the projector. That makes this one hell of a well constructed eight minutes.

Several things are responsible for the supersaturated nature of Repossessed. The efficient cinematography of Coven and D.P. Philip D. Schwartz are a big part. Each shot showed me something I needed to see and added to the story. The ominous music by Erik Godal placed me squarely in the lands of mystery and I can’t imagine the film working without his score. But it is the acting that really sells the piece. JoBeth Williams plays the realtor, and I can’t argue with the casting of the star of Poltergeist, one of the near-iconic ghost stories, in this concentrated version. As good as she is, it is Juliet Landau as Alison Labatte who is the biggest piece in the puzzle. The daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (does anyone remember Space 1999 or the first three seasons of Mission Impossible?), she is best known as Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and as Loretta King in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. She’s an amazing actress who can convey joy, hesitation, pain, and anger at a level that crawls into my spine. I don’t have to think about her performance; I can feel it. But more than that, Landau projects something foreign, something not quite right and impossible to grasp. That makes it easy to accept her as something other than a living human. When I am confronted with the notion that she is a ghost, I just nod, as her alien nature was already well anchored in my brain. Yet I still cared about Alison Labatte. All the misery that created the ghost is on screen, as well as a vision of someone exotic enough to be a ghost. And with that, the story is told, and Repossessed does it all in a scant eight minutes.

This film is available for free viewing at Atomfilms.

Best Modern Shorts, Reviews

Spider-Man (2002)

Sep 052002

Peter Parker gains his powers, which he can’t deal with. He saves Mary Jane three times, because that is her sole reason for existence. The villain of the week is The Green Goblin/Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), father of Peter Parker’s terrible best friend, Harry (James Franco). Spider-Man makes money by selling pictures of himself to editor J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) because he did that in the comics.

Comic books are important! Really, really important. There’s nothing funny or absurd about comics. They are serious, Damn it! None of that ’66 Batman stuff. No, comics are serious business. “With great power comes great responsibility” is deeply important, not the trite phrase you might use to teach morality to a three-year-old that it sounds like.

Yeah.

When Nolan decided comics needed to be overly serious, he backed that by adding complexity and moral ambiguity. Raimi thinks he’s making Citizen Kane; he’s making Bozo the Clown.

To go with the SENCERITY, Raimi and team have tossed out Spider-Man’s most defining comic book characteristic: being funny. He’s a quip machine, but not this time. He’s moody. The movie is a solid two hours of teenage angst. It’s daddy-issues and puppy love and growing up as a cartoon, and Raimi has decided that is never funny.

The Green Goblin armor might look acceptable in a comic (it might…) but is all Power Rangers in live action. The CGI is passable but not cutting edge for 2002, which it needed to be. There’s some joy to be had in Dafoe’s and J.K. Simmons’s over-the-top performances, but I found the rest a failure in ’02 and approaching unwatchable now.

What made comic book fans squee was Spider-Man’s adherence to the old comics. Its world is not ours, nor the bleakness that Nolan would bring in, but the ‘60s Marvel comics world, pretending to be in the 00s. It’s nostalgia world, which sets off all those nostalgia bells, and makes those of a certain age think far more fondly of the film than it deserves.

Reviews, Superhero Tagged with: Two Reels

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Aug 212002

Nemesis is better than it has any right to be. This is faint praise as it shouldn’t be any good at all. That it is watchable (on free cable—it is not worth actually paying for) is a miracle. There were no good decisions made in constructing this film:

An unemotional and unnecessary wedding scene.
Yet another Data twin doing a jokey-idiot routine.
That twin being detectable from many light years away (if androids emit that much radiation, Data should wipe out any planet he sets foot on).
Picard driving a dune buggy.
A species of nosferatu.
An evil Picard clone.
The Troi mind-rape scene.
Picard questioning if rising up against slave masters isn’t too mean.
Multiple clock-running-out plot points (the clone is just happening to die in a few days; the weapon will kill everyone in seven minutes).
Picard doing the manly-man “this is something I have to do” action hero bit.
Military officers (and they are military officers here, not explorers) who don’t give a damn when acquaintance die all around them but fall apart when anyone in the credits die. (I’m guessing no one invited those officers that got sucked out of the bridge to any poker games).
A big death that obviously means nothing.
Choosing a director who didn’t know the television show and had no interest in working in an established universe.

Normally I’d say that last one was the real problem, but this is a better film than it should be, so maybe not. It is horribly structured and poorly written. But, if you ask very, very little from it, you might enjoy it. It is bright and flashy. Lots of things blow up. Many weapons are fired. Lots of people die. It’s an action movie for toddlers who like shiny things that rattle about. But everyone, at sometime in their life, likes shiny things that rattle about, so at sometime in your life, you will find this mildly diverting. In that way, it is the inspiration for the J.J Abrams movies that were to follow.

My ranking of all Star Trek movies is here.

Reviews, Science Fiction, Space Opera Tagged with: Two Reels

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Jul 292002

The Adventures of Harry Potter during his second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It looks like a secret vault within Hogwarts has been opened, and the monster within is after any wizard who has non-wizard parents. Harry has been warned he’s in danger, but many at the school suspect that he is the one behind all the trouble. Once again, it is up to Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson), with some help and hindrance from professors Dumbledore (Richard Harris), McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Snape (Alan Rickman), and Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh), to uncover the answer and save the day.

The hard part about reviewing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is finding something I didn’t say in my review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, as these films are so much alike. Look at my earlier review and just project it all onto this film. For those of you who hate the thought of reading two reviews, I’ll recap. Like its predecessor, Chamber of Secrets is a beautiful film with a more than adequate cast. It has many exciting moments, presents an interesting mystery, paints engaging characters, and fills the screen with more than you could see in three viewings. It is also overly long, poorly paced, and has irrelevant scenes that are poorly integrated into the storyline. It starts too slowly and has five endings, which is at least three too many. For God’s sake, it isn’t that tricky: Once our hero has saved the day, have a brief scene wrapping up the loose ends and then end the picture.

So what has changed? Not a lot. More often than not the differences between the two films come from things being a little more than they were before. The child actors are more competent and the effects, though still overburdening the movie, are better. The monster from the Chamber of Secrets is a far cry from the poorly realized Centaur in Sorcerer’s Stone. And the plot contrivances are bigger than ever.

Harry and his friends have to deal with a great many problems in Chamber of Secrets, but most of them stem from everyone refusing to give even the slightest bit of vital information to anyone else. Hermione figures out what the monster is, but doesn’t mention it to anyone. Instead she writes it down in a note that can be found much later at a convenient moment. The truth about Hagrid’s background could have been ascertained in any number of simple, direct ways, but instead it is uncovered in the most convoluted fashion possible. There are also mind-numbingly stupid actions to create danger. Harry drops his wand (he doesn’t fumble it, but rather he just lets it go) upon finding an injured girl. Why does he drop it? If he doesn’t think he’ll need it, why not stick it in his pocket? Since he’s in the middle of a dangerous place, keeping it in hand would be smarter. But he drops it, merely because it creates a problem that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Additionally, a great deal of time is wasted with accusations that Harry is guilty of one thing or another. We know he isn’t, and most of the characters should know he isn’t, so watching these moments is tiring.

The dei ex machinis (my best guess at the plural to deus ex machina) are too noticeable in this outing, although it is generally a problem with the Harry Potter series. Things just pop up right when our heroes need them. The worst example is a car that rescues Harry and Ron. Why it pops up is never explained. That’s lazy writing. And there are multiple moments like it, including the climax.

Two major strands exist merely to show off special effects. The giant spiders are excellent CG animations, and Dobby the House Elf isn’t bad, but neither have any reason to be in the film. A few minutes of re-writes could have dumped them both (and should have).

This is a lot of writing to say something very simple: No one should see Chamber of Secrets without having seen Sorcerer’s Stone first, and how you felt about that is how you will feel about this.

It is followed by the superior Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Back to Fantasy

Fantasy, Giant Monsters, Reviews Tagged with: Three & 1/2 Reels

The Spider-Man Trilogy

Jul 052002

Spider-Man (2002)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)

A sleepy and uncharismatic late twenties/early thirties Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), cosplaying as a teenager, fails to deal emotionally with his newfound spider powers while mooning over Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), who he dumps and also saves over and over and over again. He fights an enemy who coincidently is personally known to him and gained his powers in a “science” accident. Which film in the trilogy is that? All of them, one after the other.

spiderman1 Superhero films have changed since 2002, due mainly to The Dark Knight and the MCU. The Dark Night aimed for an adult audience with themes and characters that would make sense to them. The MCU aims for a family audience, with stories, and again themes and characters that have something for kids and something for adults. But previously (and still not uncommonly), superhero films were written for children with the hope that nostalgia would tug along those who are older. So we get very simple themes that reflect a less experienced world view with characters that make sense to a ten-year-old looking forward to being a teenager. The idea in constructing these films was to find the point at which no one would feel lost or left behind. Or another way to word it: Lowest common denominator filmmaking. And that’s Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy.

Spider-Man’s characters aren’t iconic, they are simple. There are no textures. And the dialog is written to be what a pre-teen imagines the coolest thing ever would be. People make bold proclamations on what is right or of the “we’ll be the best friends forever” variety. It’s a power fantasy for children. And since some adults remember the old comics, they are willing to buy into that prepubescent fantasy. It’s silly and a bit embarrassing, but if your life isn’t what you wanted it to be, then I suppose indulging in juvenile dreams doesn’t do any harm. But it doesn’t make the material any more interesting or sophisticated.

The Teen Peter Parker… Or not.

Old-school casting doesn’t help. Not only are the structure, themes, and characters in Spider-Man for kids, they are about kids, or teens. Peter Parker is a teen. Not a real teen mind you, but a Hollywood teen, but a teen none the less. And everything he does is a mirror for growing up. He feels lost, suffocated, and alone, with changes he doesn’t understand. He wants to impress the girl in the most childish way imaginable. He rebels against his parents (Uncle, but same difference), and learns his lesson. Now that’s fine for a fifteen-year-old. For a twenty-seven-year-old like Maguire, it’s pathetic. And Maguire looks every bit of his age. Yes, age inappropriate casting has been done before in Hollywood and it has always been problematic. 1936’s Romeo and Juliet was a joke with a thirty-four-year-old Norma Shearer pretending to be a young girl discovering her sexuality and romance. It just doesn’t work. If you want to tell the story of a mature Peter Parker, great. But if it is a teen story, focusing on problems and experiences that apply purely to teens, than your star better look like someone who can say, “My body is going through changes” without making me want to back away slowly.

One could argue the age gap is less of a problem in Spider-Man 2—where Maguire is twenty-nine—and Spider-Man 3—where he’s thirty-two—but that only posits an older character (still far younger than Maguire), not older themes. The sequels have the same stories with the same themes. And it is still weird for a man to be speaking boys’ lines.

Not that Maguire is the only act of bad casting. All the “young” actors are too old, and bring nothing with them. Dunst looks great in a wet shirt, but if that’s all you’ve got, maybe a Girls-Gone-Wild video would be more appropriate. I’m sure James Franco can be good doing something besides play himself, but I haven’t seen it, and he’s a black hole as the partial character he barely plays.

So, what’s good about the series? Well, not a whole lot besides the villains. They are across the board 1975-era juvenile, but that makes them better than the rest of their films because they are at least lively. If you are making a dippy children’s film, then admit that you are making one, and with the villains, they do.

Outside of them, the franchise’s main positive is that while it doesn’t have much good, where it is weak, it isn’t as weak as so many others. Yes, it is simple, but not as simple as Superman IV. The casting is wrong, but not as wrong as Batman Forever or Batman & Robin. In 2002, superhero fans had few films to be excited about. The Spider-Man trilogy ranked high among a collection of poor to terrible films where only a few were clearly good. Now, there’s plenty of better choices, leaving these three films to stand on their own merits, and they don’t have many.

Spider-Man

Peter Parker gains his powers, which he can’t deal with. He saves Mary Jane three times, because that is her sole reason for existence. The villain of the week is The Green Goblin/Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), father of Peter Parker’s terrible best friend, Harry (James Franco). Spider-Man makes money by selling pictures of himself to editor J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) because he did that in the comics.

Yeah.

When Nolan decided comics needed to be overly serious, he backed that by adding complexity and moral ambiguity. Raimi thinks he’s making Citizen Kane; he’s making Bozo the Clown.

Spider-Man 2

Peter still can’t deal with his life and has a three-year-old’s grasp on relationships. Harry is still terrible. Mary Jane is still around to be saved (three times again) and still cheating on whatever boyfriend she currently has. The villain of the week is Doc Ock (Alfred Molina).

Spider-Man was serious! So, since sequels have to ratchet up everything, Spider-Man 2 ratchets up the self-importance. Peter whines, “What am I supposed to do?” and I am supposed to feel sorry for him. I don’t. His problems are epic if you are a child. For anyone not a child, “grow up” is the proper response.

The romance, again, has the maturity of a young teen’s view of the world. I hope that no adult takes any of this as accurate or they are doomed to a very sad life. And to go with that silliness, Peter’s teen angst now has a literal representation in his failing powers. It is not subtle, but then children’s films rarely are.

Harry has changed from the first film, delving into slimy James Franco mode, which makes him a bit less boring although no more enjoyable. Later he becomes nasty, and that’s beyond Franco’s ability to pull off. Molina steps in as the new cartoon villain, but he does it with as much heart as the trilogy allows. Whether that is an improvement or not depends on how arch you like your evil-doers. That he really is stoppable by anyone with a gun does make his campaign of crime harder to buy than the Goblin’s. After all, Aunt May messes him up. But yeah, I’ll call him an upgrade.

Once again , the CGI is less than it should be (with a fight on the side of a building standing out). The big set piece combat on a train isn’t bad (though it so overpowers Spider-Man that Doc Ock should have been dead from one punch), and has the trilogy’s only truly emotional moment, but I’ve become spoiled and it wouldn’t rank in the top thirty superhero fights now, and that’s all Spiderman 2 has to offer.

Reviewing Spider-Man 2 is pointless after writing one for Spider-Man. They are the same. Not that the first had any claim to originality, but this level of copying is extreme even for sequels. The villain is a touch better and the preaching is even more annoying (yes, yes, be a hero), but otherwise, we’ve seen it all before.

And as a big fan of The Importance of Being Earnest, I find it irritating that Mary Jane’s version apparently starts late in the second act.

Spider-Man 3

In a shocking development, Peter Parker has problems dealing with his powers and his relationships. Mary Jane is still around to be saved, and to be a rotten girlfriend, though it is hard to blame her. And our villain of the week is the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), the retconned killer of Uncle Ben who fell into a science experiment. But this time there’s a second villain in Venom, a space symbiot who happens to infect Peter and then happens to bond with yet another person Peter happens to know (Topher Grace), because all super villains are connected to Peter personally. And Harry is still around as the New Goblin so the villain pool is crowded. Plus now we have Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is both in Peter’s physics class and happens to need to be saved by Spider-Man.

Here we go again. Same verse, same as the first. Well, almost, as the Batman problem with too many villains is accelerating. None of these miscreants is on anyone’s top ten list, although the scene of The Sandman waking up is the only time the trilogy does anything interesting cinematically. Unfortunately the rest of The Sandman’s appearances are ripped-off effects from The Mummy (1999). Venom was forced upon Raimi by the production company and he put little work into integrating that villain with the ones he had chosen. However, the big team up at the end isn’t bad.

But this is Spider-Man 3 and the only thing anyone wants to talk about is Dark Peter’s dance. Why do so many people hate it? It’s not because it isn’t fitting. Peter is (supposedly) a deeply uncool guy, so when the symbiot makes him attempt to be cool, this is what he comes up with. The scene also has the advantage of being something different in a trilogy that needs something, anything, different. But comics fans hate it.

The problem is they want the supposedly-uncool Peter to be cool. Spider-Man is wish fulfillment for people who think they deserved respect and didn’t get it. So they need their hero to be respected. They need him to be cool. Making fun of Spider-Man is not allowed, and the scene makes it easy to make fun of him. The hatred has nothing to do with the scene, but with some viewers’ need for validation.

I lack ego connection to Spider-Man, and am happy for something in the movie that isn’t a repeat.

The Spider-Man trilogy has some importance in the development of the superhero film genre (though much less than Superman, Batman, Blade, and X-Men) and sold a lot of tickets. But in time it will get lost under a pile of better films.

Superhero

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)

Apr 172002

Since the 1954 destruction of Godzilla, Japan has been attacked multiple times by giant Monsters. A military force created to battle these threats has kept the country more or less safe (OK, Tokyo has been stomped a few times, but can’t make an omelet…) but cannot deal with a new Godzilla that appears out of nowhere. The government decides the best option is to build a “bio-robot” using the bones of the original Godzilla. When not working on the machine, the lead scientist makes uncomfortable advances on the self-hating, but hot, female pilot who only seems capable of two expressions.

QUICK REVIEW: Once again, the Godzilla franchise reboots, tossing out every series film except the first, which, for a change, is taken in its entirety (including the big guy’s death). It presents an interesting world, where monsters are a mysterious fact of life, and then ignores it. It also ignores Godzilla most of the time. When he’s on screen we can get some enjoyable monster mayhem, but when he isn’t, he barely pops up in conversation. The focus is on the awkward and unfulfilled romance, the trials of the drab pilot (really, did the director tell her not to act?), and a child that blurts out pointless moral mumbojumbo. Tacked on to fill up time is the determined planning of the prime minister and science minister, which should have been cut when the script was in first draft. Sure, Godzilla films have had worse human characters and human subplots, but here they are center stage. It seems someone had Toho thought they were making high drama. He was wrong.

The opening monster attack sets up a great daikaiju flick, but it slips into mediocrity.

Godzilla, Reviews Tagged with: Two & 1/2 Reels

The Eye “Jian gui” (2002)

Apr 102002

A blind woman, Wong Kar Mun (Angelica Lee, also known as Lee Sin-je), is given an eye operation that restores her sight. But her blurry first images include dark shapes that visit the beds of the dying. Soon she is seeing the dead everywhere, and she starts to break down.

One of the more significant entries in the new wave of Asian horror, The Eye mixes two well used American stories: the standard ghost story and the “transplanted body parts keep a memory of their past” story. And right away we see the problem. An eye that is still attuned to its original owner is not the stuff of A-movies. For a time, it looked like it would be a cleverer film, when it is suggested that Mun was always special (in the magical sense), but never knew it as she was blind. Now that she can see, she sees far too much, but that notion is blown away.

The first half is effective. As Mun has been blind since the age of two, she can’t even identify normal things. When her doctor holds up a stapler, she has no idea what it is until she touches it. So, she doesn’t initially understand that she’s seeing more than everyone else, and doesn’t even have the vocabulary to explain. As she learns, The Eye makes it terrifyingly clear that there are some things better not to know. This would have been pretty dull in a typical American movie, but the Asian new wave knows how to make things frightening. Several scenes, particularly a calligraphy lesson with an extra student and a slowly approaching ghost in an elevator, are filled with Ringu-level scares.

Unfortunately, the film shifts from horror to mystery as Mun and her helpfully bland psychologist search for information on her cornea donor. I don’t think I’m giving away anything to say that she used to see the dead too. The detective work is unimpressive, and the mystery is no mystery at all. It’s not bad; it’s just routine.

There’s also a tacked on climax after the “mystery” is solved, which is the most irritating part of the film because it makes Mun out to be the stupidest person you’d ever meet. Apparently, she’s learned nothing from her experiences in the rest of the film, or from the life of her cornea donor. If she’d behaved in a way that grew from the previous 90 minutes, the ending could have had real power.

The Eye is a watchable picture with a few great scares and many lost opportunities. We’ll see what Hollywood can do with it in the 2006 remake.

Back to Ghost Stories

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Dark Water (2002)

Mar 102002

Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki), a recently divorced mother going through an unpleasant custody battle, moves with her young daughter (Rio Kanno) to an apartment with a water-damaged ceiling. Soon, water is dripping into the bedroom, and a missing girl is appearing and disappearing around the building.

Director Hideo Nakata created a new horror film movement in 1998 with his masterpiece, Ringu. “J-Horror” had the edge over its Western equivalents because it was actually frightening (is there anyone who wakes up in a cold sweat from a nightmare about Jason or Freddy?), at least at first. Japan and Korea stamped out sequels and follow-ups and the world was suddenly jam-packed with ghostly little girls with long black hair. Nakata made the bland, techno-babble-filled Ringu 2, then took a few years off from horror before returning with Dark Water. Working once again from a novel by Ringu scribe, Kôji Suzuki, the result is a satisfying ghost story that breaks no new ground.

The film starts off slowly, focusing on the drama of a woman in a male-dominated society trying to find a job and a place to live. If she makes a mistake, she could lose her child, and while Yoshimi is a good woman, she’s prone to mistakes. She is also poor at explaining her past metal health treatments. Generally lost and frightened, her concern is for her daughter, and perhaps, in beating her ex-husband, at least once.

Except for an initial shock, the switch from drama to ghost story is subtle. Water, in the form of natural rain which reflects her depression and frustration, turns to unnatural puddles and leaks. Her real world problems pale when compared to a dead child whose desires are unknown. Of course all the supernatural goings-on are metaphors for her struggles and the longing never to be left alone. That doesn’t make them less scary or, in the world of the movie, any less real.

Once the horror aspect is in full bloom, the movie really clicks. The pace triples, and the tension goes through the roof. Things are seriously wrong in the dilapidated apartment complex and the viewer can feel is as well as Yoshimi. It all builds to a rewarding climax that should have more sensitive movie-goers hiding behind loved-ones. Nakata ups the emotional ante with an epilogue which is satisfying, and creepy.

Still, I would have liked Nakata to have offered a few fresher ideas. The shadow of Ringu is ever-present. Once again it is a separated mother who fears for her child, dealing with the ghost of a young girl (with black, stringy hair), and again there is the twist ending. And in each area of comparison, Dark Water comes out lacking: the frights are slighter, the mystery is obvious from the beginning, the twist is less dramatic and terrifying, and the mother-child relationship isn’t as engaging. Even without looking at its predecessor, Dark Water doesn’t shine. Nakata is trying so hard to make his points about the state of women in society and abandonment, that he hammers over and over on what was clear in the first few minutes. For a half hour, it feels like an episode of a made-for-TV series on the Women’s Cable Network.

The ending makes the journey worthwhile, but it is a more arduous and repetitive journey than it should have been. Dark Water is a solid entry in the J-Horror movement, but it is a movement which is dying from a lack of new concepts, and being better than the average member of the herd of Ringu rip-offs isn’t saying much.

It was remade in the U.S. in 2005 as Dark Water. Nakata directed The Ring Two (2005), the sequel to The Ring (2001), which was the English language remake of Ringu.

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Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Below (2002)

Feb 082002

A WWII submarine being hunted by a German ship picks up three survivors from a torpedoed hospital ship, one, a woman. The crew is on edge, the new captain too extreme, and voices and strange occurrences begin to haunt the boat.

Quick Review: With Pitch Black and Below, David Twohy has become the modern master of claustrophobia. There is no place to move in Below, either physically or psychologically, and it becomes unpleasant for everyone before it’s over, even the viewer. It is a tense film, with a number of scares, most cheap jump moments but a few routed deeper. As soon as I realized I was watching the standard ghost story hiding inside a military thriller, it was easy to predict everything that would happen, but that’s usually the case with movies about hauntings. This isn’t a film I’d suggest for repeat viewing, but for fans of supernatural suspense, Below is a must see.

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Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Lost Voyage (2001)

Oct 112001

In 1972, the SS Corona Queen vanished in the Bermuda Triangle, taking with it Aaron Roberts’ parents. Now, the ship has returned, a derelict. Roberts (Judd Nelson), now a paranormal investigator, and three TV tabloid reporters catch a ride to the ship with salvage agent David Shaw (Lance Henriksen) and two employees (Jeff Kober, Mark Sheppard). Of course, the ship is haunted.

A run-of-the-mill, ghosts-on-a-boat film, Lost Voyage has a bit more style than other low-budget frighteners. A cast containing some talented character actors helps. Henriksen, Kober, and Sheppard elevate the material and add both a touch of realism and humor. Unfortunately, they aren’t the leads. Those jobs fall to Janet Gunn, who does an adequate job of playing the same journalist I’ve seen in dozens of films, and Judd Nelson, who needs to up his medications (and wash his hair). Wide eyed, he murmurs his lines with randomly chosen expressions. His Aaron Roberts is an odd sort of protagonist since the film follows him, but the story does not. He is very concerned about what happened to his parents (well, he says he is; it’s hard to tell from his inflections), but nothing comes of it and his interest just fades away.

While a moody story of a haunting, it proclaims itself to be a variation on 1997’s space-faring Event Horizon. In both, a ship leaves our universe, traveling to an unexplained and probably evil other place (none of which is on camera), and then returns, bringing along an intelligence. This entity, now merged with the ship, uses people’s fears and desires to destroy them. While in Event Horizon this is an essential part of the film and is demonstrated by events, in Lost Voyage it’s just said by the characters. Roberts proclaims that “My research shows that the triangle is a doorway to another place.” I’m curious just what kind of research he’s been doing.

Lost Voyage would have benefited from less mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science. I would be thrilled if I never saw another film that mentioned the Bermuda Triangle or included an institute that studies the paranormal. So, the whole thing is rather silly. No surprise there. But for what it is, a cheap, supernatural thriller, it’s not bad.

Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

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