Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Eye 10

(2005) **1/2


Completing their Eye trilogy, the Pang Brothers give us The Eye 10, a shadow-of-its-former-self kind sequel to their popular horror series. In the excellent The Eye (2002) the recipient of a cornea transplant begins seeing really creepy ghosts (much better than The Sixth Sense). In The Eye 2 (2004) a woman begins seeing ghosts after attempting suicide while pregnant. In the Eye 10 (the 10 by the way refers to the 10 different ways one encounters ghosts) a group of teens swap ghost encounter stories while vacationing in Thailand. Upon their return to Hong Kong they find that pesky ghosts are now pursuing them. The film follows their various ghost encounters through a series of anthology-like stories.

The first clue that this film was going to stink arrived early and loudly. Bearing a striking resemblance to the opening credits of the old Charlie’s Angels television series, the first few minutes of Eye 10 presents us with an annoying group of teens (see picture to share annoyance) goofing off in an amusement park to poor techno music and a lot of freeze-frames surrounded by 70s art deco stylings (i.e., drawings of cartoon shooting stars, etc). Had it not required me to walk the 4 feet to my DVD player, I would’ve jettisoned that bad boy faster than you can say Paris Hilton probably can’t write her name in the mud with a stick. Consequently the tone of Eye 10 was ruined from the get-go. It didn’t improve much from there.

One thing I will say about the Pang Brothers is that they portray ghosts better than anyone. Despite the shortcomings of this film, it was still a treat to see the various haunts the teens encounter. I tried to find a picture but the best I could do comes from The Eye 2. In this scene a woman is in an elevator and turns around to find this woman silently floating in front of her. What’s great about Pang Brother ghosts is that they don’t announce their arrival with any noise/shrieking. They’re just suddenly kind of there and boy is it creepy when they show up.


Boo-Berry was not in The Eye 10

1 comment:

Octopunk said...

No Boo-Berry? Dammit!

The original Eye was my introduction to the wonders of Asian horror, and still one of the best I've seen. Ooh, I just gave myself a chill thinking about it.

Nice to know they still get the ghosts right, anyway.

Do you think Samara would still be scary if she had Boo-Berry's little yellow hat? Yeah, me too.

Malevolent

 2018  ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...