arutha10002
Someone is a fan of shaky-cam (or just couldn't afford a steady cam). But not content with annoying the audience with shaky cam, nonsensical jump-cuts were added to not only make the audience nauseated, but annoyed as well. Half the movie is close-ups of people's faces and the other half of the movie is too dark to see anything. Very bad.The story itself is nothing special. I was looking forward to it because I learned all about "Ghost Month" in Taiwan. The 7th lunar month is when spirits from the netherworld can come and cause mischief in our world, thus all the burning stuff to placate those spirits. It was more annoying than scary, interesting, or suspenseful.
p-stepien
A pair of newlyweds decide to spend their honeymoon in China, where Yul (Tim Chiou) intends to visit his relatives, including his grandmother Nai Nai. His love Melissa (Amy Hart) finds joy in their first days of stay, extremely pleased with the exotic appeal of the Hungry Ghost festival. After this event they drive out to finally visit Yul's family, only for their driver Ping (Dennis Chan) to get lost somewhere in the Chinese countryside. He goes into a small village to ask for directions, but fails to return. Yul and Melissa set out to find him, but instead encounter offerings of live animals. Apparently the ghosts are not a myth, but actually the Asian cousins of the crawlers (from the movie "Descent").Eduardo Sánchez of "Blair With Project" fame executes his new endeavour with some old-style classical frights mixed with some of his trademark hand-held camera filming. All mounted assuredly on the shoulders of a rather traditional and unadventurous script together with some rip-off monsters. In short - nothing really innovative or creative of note. That said all elements are well handled. The eeriness, frights and basic storytelling is all present and as such manage to engage for the duration. Several plot points to stick out like a sore thumb and given how little of a story there actually was it is a major flaw of the movie. The biggest irk is the seemingly unresolved issue of Yul's final wish.Nonetheless a horror with a very classical feel to it. It won't get extra marks for pushing any boundaries, but definitely heads over heels above most horrors churned out nowadays. The rating on IMDb does seem on the low side for my taste, especially given how highly graded dozens of craptacular genre pieces are.Both leads do a decent enough job to make you care for their fate, but the script would have done better with some further character build-up. As it is the movie feels awkwardly rushed in many places, but overlong in others. Despite not being a hand-held camera fan I found that this time around it worked especially well and added some gritty tension to the story delivery.
y-45
I started watching this movie with lowest expectations possible - really I did. I went watching it only because I wanted to free room on the HD but first 5 min into the film and I soon started realizing that it just might not be as bad, but still I really didn't expect to get this much out of it. First off - if you're one of the people who didn't like 'The Blair Witch Project' and don't put much into stuff like 'Cloverfield', 'Welcome To The Jungle' or 'Quarantine' then really don't go for this one either, but I gotta say it's your bad because this movie is and has all that a true horror movie should, and I don't mean horror like the whole 'texas chainsaw massacre' flick(of which I really like the 2 latest editions) or 'saw'(which I can't stand) etc. What I mean is horror down to the bone; one of those master-pieces not very much unlike the classics such as 'exorcist' or 'Amityville Horror'(the first 2) because what all these movies share is a real passion and love in being a part of this most underrated movie genre.Well, I really don't care much about going into movie analysis or what not, the way that these things(This is my first review here) are meant to be done but I guess what I wanted(and felt obliged to) say is already said and that being the fact that this movie is rated so poorly and it doesn't even have a poster, so...All in all this is real horror whether you know/like it or not, this is an expression of pure passion for this downtrodden genre and I won't say it scared the hell out of me, it didn't but it did something that is much tougher to achieve, what that is exactly I couldn't say, at least not in a few words and like I said I don't care much about semi-professional reviewing that is so much sought after on IMDb pages.In short: If you think a new breed of horror has emerged with the making of Blair Witch Project and that it has continued uninterrupted ever since with some of the movies I mentioned above then this is your 2008's successor to that fragile but so far successful trend of making this genre stay fresh and up-to-date.Gojo
Emmanie Theuma
Well, I didn't read any reviews about this movie so as not to be negatively or positively affected. But 3 minutes into the film, I just couldn't make out anything. I even went to fetch my glasses because I thought I wasn't seeing clearly or something, but even that didn't help! The camera work was nauseating, it gave me a headache from all the eye twitching! I believe this movie's plot could have been played out much better because the story does have potential being a traditional legend and all. The initial scenes were colourful, nicely shot and very traditional but for the way the rest of the movie was shot, a huge NO no ... I rated it 5* just for the story and the initial scenes.
AD
