Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Memento Mori / The Eye 2

I think I must have maxed myself out on the Asian horror genre now.

Both of these movies are visually interesting and have great musical scores, but the underlying formula is getting very tired and I was personally too knocked out to watch through to the end of either. (V did though, and was un-astounded by the ways things panned out.)

El mal siempre busca una segunda oportunidad is the Spanish tagline for the Pang brothers' The Eye 2, perhaps a chilling warning about sequels in general. Its frazzled female protagonist doesn't need a corneal transplant in order to see dead people; instead this time round a near-death experience is enough to get them popping up in taxis and on crowded subway trains, and in a bizarre Buddhist angle, jostling to dive into her womb so they can get on with their next karmic cycle. Religion in horror only really works if you are a signed-up member of the faithful, and here it is operating pretty close to the level of ignorant superstition.

Memento Mori (sequel to Whispering Corridors) is about a pair of telepathic lesbians in an all-girls school. They produce a colourful journal together then one of them croaks and starts to haunt the school via said diary, which has fallen into the hands of a third girl that is mildly obsessed about the first two. Or at least that's what I gathered what was going on in the flurry of flashbacks and flash-forwards before chiller fatigue gripped me and I lost consciousness.

Stylish, surreal, dreamlike, tense in places, there's ultimately not much more to these stories than the tale of a protagonist that needs to overcome an acutely vindictive spook. I think I've reached the point where the ghost with issues scenario needs to call it quits and start walking towards the white light.

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