There’s a welcome sense of variety to Taiwanese director Joe Chien’s fifteen-year old filmography: horror is his genre of predilection, but within it he rarely repeats himself: there’s the quirky and oblique Buttonman, the grindhouse zombie flicks Zombie 108 and Zombie Fight Club, the classy haunted house mystery The House that never dies II, as well as the phantasmagorical, Silent Hill-like The Apostles, with its admirably bold final twist. And with Abyssal Spider (the more ridiculous title “Mad Spider Sea” appears in the film itself, but not on the posters) Chien tries his hand at a maritime creature feature.
All posts tagged horror
ABYSSAL SPIDER (aka MAD SPIDER SEA) (2020) review
Posted by LP Hugo on November 1, 2020
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/11/01/abyssal-spider-aka-mad-spider-sea-2020-review/
MISSING (2019) short review
Ronnie Chau’s Missing is the filmic equivalent of a low-energy cub-scouts leader improvising a stale little scary story by the campfire, culling faintly from Japanese or Hong Kong horror films he’s watched years ago, managing to spook only those of the children who are sleeping out of their home for the very first time. It follows a social worker (Gillian Chung) whose father disappeared seven years ago, and who hears that the hills of Sai Kung may hold a portal to an alternate dimension, a limbo full of unhappy souls endlessly reliving the circumstances of their death. From that vaguest of urban legends, director Ronnie Chau has made a film that laudably eschews jump scares and amusingly needle-drops a few references to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (including a overhead shot of a car in the countryside, to an eerie rendition of the Dies Irae), but substitute muted colors for atmosphere and is populated by a small ensemble of the dullest characters imaginable: a self-serious social worker, a burnt-out salaryman, a dour cop, a nagging mother… The cast, led by Gillian Chung who alternates between blank stares and ‘gasping fish’ overacting, doesn’t do much to elevate the material. And so it’s impossible to care for anything that happens onscreen for the film’s skimpy yet overlong eighty minutes; and with the already scant beans spilled very early on, mystery is absent. And like most shallow horror films that want to appear deep, there’s a final resort to the old “the real ghosts are inside us” platitude. As far as recent Hong Kong horror goes, it’s at least a notch or two over the atrocious Binding Souls, but that’s damning with faint praise. *1/2
Posted by LP Hugo on April 25, 2020
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/04/25/missing-2019-short-review/
BINDING SOULS (2019) short review
After the middling exorcism film Daughter, director Chan Pang Chun returns to the horror genre and reunites with Kara Hui with Binding Souls, a mind-bogglingly laughable and cheap exercise in regurgitating the lamest, most overused horror tropes. Get a load of this plot: a group of college students (there’s the horny one, the bookish one, the sexy one, the scaredy one…) decide to spend a few days in an abandoned school that was once used by the Japanese army as a place to torture, rape and conduct experiments on Chinese prisoners. While the school has been closed for almost a decade, its old principal (Yuen Cheung Yan) still hangs around, as does a troubled janitor (Kara Hui), whose daughter disappeared years ago at the school, and who keeps hoping she’ll turn up. The youngsters plan to have some fun, but soon they’re plagued with visions of hostile ghosts. Over the course of the film’s skimpy yet overlong 88 minutes, there’s simply not a single fresh idea and not the least bit of suspense. The ghosts are standard-issue white-clad, black-hair-over-the-face, standing-at-the-back-of-a-corridor clichés. Ridiculousness – without any self-awareness of course – is omnipresent, from 33 years-old Carlos Chan cringingly playing a college student (one of the worst performances in a theatrically-released film this year, no doubt), to some very, very sad CGI. There’s no sense of atmosphere and the final twists arrive very late after any awake audience member saw them coming; only the first scene, a very nasty scene of wartime Japanese horror, raises the pulse somewhat, but it’s an ugly an exploitative sight. Kara Hui pops up from time to time, a sight for sore eyes made heavy by the blissful temptation of sleep. no stars
Posted by LP Hugo on March 18, 2020
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/03/18/binding-souls-2019/
ENDLESS LOOP (2018) short review
In Wen He’s Endless Loop, a woman whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere hitches a ride with a man who turns out to be a violent psychopath. Not long after, seven people riding a minibus in the same part of the Chinese countryside find themselves in a tunnel that doesn’t seem to end. Worse: when they try to go back the way they came in, they realize the tunnel has apparently become a loop, and what looks like an exit door actually leads then to another looped tunnel, strikingly similar yet with key differences. The seven strangers must work together to find a way out, but the ugliness of human nature in extreme circumstances quickly derails their efforts at survival. With an opening scene not unlike that of Kim Jee-woon’s I saw the Devil, a set-up and some episodes that call to mind Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After, and (SPOILER ALERT) a second-reel twist that turns the film into a near-remake of Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (END SPOILERS), Endless Loop is rather low on originality. Yet it’s briskly-paced, well-acted by a solid ensemble (with the ever-reliable and low-key Nie Yuan at its center), and ends in a flurry of off-the-wall dreamlike sequences that artfully get around budgetary constraints and are tightly connected to the narrative, so that they never feel gratuitous. A step in the right direction for Mainland horror. ***
Posted by LP Hugo on January 3, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/01/03/endless-loop-2018-short-review/
THE SECRET OF IMMORTAL CODE (2018) review
A (very) rare Chinese sci-fi horror film, Li Wei and Zhang Nan’s The Secret of Immortal Code is set in the middle of the 22nd century: the Rafael pharmaceutical company, headed by the enigmatic Doctor Yao (Zhao Lixin), claims to be close to perfecting a cure for cancer, and proposes to cryopreserve – for a price – patients in the final stages of the disease, so that they may survive until the cure is finally ready. Yet 20 years later, it seems no closer to delivering the promised drug, and families are suing for commercial fraud. Lin Ziqi (Liang Jing) is in the same situation: her cancer-stricken sister Yuqi (Landi Li) has been in cryo-sleep for 18 years. One day, she receives a notification that Yuqi has been unplugged for no reason, which gives her only a few days to live. When she confronts Doctor Yao about this, he invites her to join him on a sea expedition to the Arctic, when a Rafael research station may hold the key to finally perfecting the cure.
Posted by LP Hugo on August 14, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/08/14/the-secret-of-immortal-code-2018-review/
THE MYSTERIOUS FAMILY (2017) review
Very loosely – and somewhat tastelessly – based on real-life events (the massacre of a whole family in Fujian province in 2014), Park Yu-hwan’s The Mysterious Family follows Miao Miao (Ariel Lin) a young student who one night is beaten and raped by a mysterious stranger (Blue Lan). This leaves her traumatized, dependent on medication and uncommunicative to her parents (Jiang Wu and Kara Hui) and brother (Xiao Chen). One Christmas Eve, upon returning home after training for a marathon, she witnesses her family being murdered by the same man who assaulted her months ago; yet she suddenly wakes up, as if from a vivid nightmare, on the running track where she had been practicing in the afternoon. But as she goes home, her family is again murdered by the same man, with subtle changes to the situation. And again Miao Miao wakes up on the running track. Stuck in a nightmarish loop, she must figure out how to save her family.
Posted by LP Hugo on July 24, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/07/24/the-mysterious-family-2017/
BUTTERFLY CEMETERY (aka ON FALLEN WINGS) (2017) review
Joe Ma’s Butterfly Cemetery, based on a novel by Cai Jun (whose works also “inspired” Law Chi Leung’s Curse of the Deserted, Fruit Chan’s Kill Time or Joe Chien’s The House that Never Dies II) follows Shang Xiaodie (Zhang Li), a ballet dancer still reeling from the mysterious disappearance of her lover Ming Ye (Vivian Dawson), with a vague newspaper obituary her only element of closure. When she receives an offer to spend one month in Budapest to train a Chinese ballet company founded by the wealthy Zhuang family, she takes it as an opportunity to clear her mind. But once in Hungary, she realizes her lost lover is still alive and is none other than the eldest son of the Zhuang family, that his fate is linked to a mysterious mausoleum on the Zhuang’s property, and that their first encounter in the past was far from random.
Posted by LP Hugo on March 6, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/03/06/butterfly-cemetery-aka-on-fallen-wings-2017/
ALWAYS BE WITH YOU (2017) review
Always Be With You may be a somewhat clumsy title, but it’s still better than Troublesome Night 20, which is nevertheless what this Herman Yau film is. Louis Koo was in seven of these late-nineties, early-naughties horror films that often crossed narratives and mixed some comedy into the mildly tense supernatural goings-on. Now he’s back, surrounded with a cast of newcomers to the franchise (except Law Lan, who was in 17 of the previous installments). A handful of people are brought together by fate on the night of a car accident that claims several lives: there’s a cab driver (Julian Cheung), drunk after learning he is terminally ill, a couple of cops (Louis Koo and Charmaine Sheh), their exorcist auntie (Law Lan) a shopkeeper and his wife (Lam Suet and Kingdom Yuen), a young, freshly-engaged couple (Charlene Choi and Alex Lam), and a few more. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the ones who survived are haunted by those who died, and yet those who died are not necessarily the ones we think.
(more…)
Posted by LP Hugo on December 19, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/12/19/always-be-with-you-2017-review/
THE HOUSE THAT NEVER DIES II (2017) review
Three years after Raymond Yip’s The House that never dies became the highest-grossing Chinese horror film, comes this Gordon Chan-produced sequel, featuring a different cast and a new set of characters, but still taking place at N°81 Chanoei in Beijing, a famous mansion believed to be haunted. This time, engineer Song Teng (Julian Cheung) is working on restoring the old mansion, while neglecting his wife He (Mei Ting), a doctor. The couple has grown estranged following the stillbirth of their child five years before, and Song’s apparent reciprocal fondness for his assistant (Gillian Chung) isn’t helping matters. In an attempt to solidify their marriage, He moves in with her husband in the old house, but soon she is plagued by visions and nightmares, that appear to be memories of a past life: at the beginning of the 20th century, a general (Julian Cheung) who lived in this mansion had to marry the daughter (Gillian Chung) of a warlord, to solidify an alliance and to ensure he would have an heir, after his first wife (Mei Ting) failed to beget him one. But the general’s affections were still for his first wife, and his new bride proved barren as well. And deadly jealous.
Posted by LP Hugo on July 25, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/07/25/the-house-that-never-dies-ii-2017-review/
LOST MINDS (2016) short review
Lynn Chen’s Lost Minds follows a couple (Jian RenZi and Andrew Lin) who has been unsuccessfully trying to have a child for a few years, and decides to resort to an old Chinese fertility ritual, that of the “primer”: to temporarily adopt a child, who will open the way for their own progeny. They adopt a quiet 7-year-old girl (Wang Yifei) at an orphanage whose supervisors (Hui Shiu Hung and Pat Ha) are obviously not telling them everything. The adopted child is silent, asocial and constantly draws disturbingly dark pictures of her previous family. It doesn’t help that her new mother is beset with strange visions that threaten her sanity. Like so many mediocre horror films, Lost Minds uses a lead character’s vacillating sanity as an excuse to bombard the audience with nightmare sequences and jump-scare visions that thus don’t need to be justified by the story (since, you know, the character’s sanity is vacillating). There are a few passable red herrings until the final twist – a demystifying one as always in China’s supernatural-free horror genre – brings the film to a thudding close, with belabored exposition and flashbacks, to make sure everyone understands the denouement. Very little tension and virtually no scares are mustered, though the unsettling white glow of the cinematography is rather effective and well-judged, and Jian RenZi’s performance is fairly affecting, while Wang Yifei is an excellent child actress whose alternating creepiness and cuteness are never forced. Andrew Lin sleepwalks through the film, Hui Shiu Hung is wasted in a rare serious role, and the great Pat Ha valiantly makes the best of her poorly-written role. *1/2
Posted by LP Hugo on February 4, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/02/04/lost-minds-2016-short-review/
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