(2009) ***
Chinese believe that during the seventh lunar month, for 30 days, the dead roam among the living seeking revenge. This is the same premise for the film The Maid reviewed by JPX yesterday. In Seventh Moon, it coincides with the Melissa and Yule's (as in Brenner) Honeymoon. They could've gone to Hawaii, but nah, the Chinese countryside is much nicer.
So, one night their tour guide Ping, gets lost while driving them through the countryside. He goes to ask for directions and never comes back. Melissa and Yule decide to venture out looking for him, and what ensues is a cat and mouse game between the couple and the ghosts.
Are the ghosts still there hon?The set-up takes about 20 minutes, and I expected the can and mouse game to continue for the next hour until the end when either the sun would come up or our couple would die. But this film pleasantly surprised me as the cat and mouse game is shown as a high stakes game of survival, and really only lasts 30 minutes. The last 30 minutes then gets into the lore/rules of these Chinese ghosts and the characters explore the hope and futility of their situation.
Overall, this is a good film. It's main tagline of the package is "From a director of The Blair Witch Project". In this film, I think that ended up being more of a liability as the director frequently uses the whole shakey-cam thing while following the couple, trying to give it a camcorder sort of feel. This would make sense during the cat and mouse portion, but seems out of place when the couple is sitting in the backseat of their car talking to the driver.
Three stars - worth taking a look at, far from a standout.
4 comments:
Tony & I caught this on Fearnet a couple of months ago. You said, "the director frequently uses the whole shakey-cam thing while following the couple" This drove us nuts and yeah, the film would definitely have rated higher if he had scrapped the shaky cam at some point. Nice review.
Not a fan of the shaky cam. Especially when unnecessary. That would probably be enough for me to take a pass.
Funny, 50 P’s Blair Witch 2 review made me wonder if the director did anything else but I never researched it (because there were 50 more reviews to get through.) I’m guessing I would like this one.
Wow, how random that we both hit upon the same strange Chinese custom! This one actually sounds pretty damn good. I'll definitely check it out. Nice summary.
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