Movie Reviews: A Tale Of Two Sisters
As a general rule, you may want to stay away from South Korean horror movies. I know that to us Europeans everyone from Asia looks the same, but when it comes to movies, the differences are important. For example - people from China make the best action films. In Japan they make good horror films. I don't know what South Koreans (sp?) are good at, but it sure isn't horror. True, they made one really great scary Ringu clone (Shutter), but the rest is pretty much forgettable.
Take this movie for example - it's absolutely and completely terrible. One thing that I hate about recent movies is how they put all this bizzarre supernatural Lynchian stuff in, and in the end everything is explained like "this character is MAD, so he's imagining things, this one is schizophrenic, so he also has some problems with reality, this one is being eaten by guilt for cooking his neighbor's cat, this one is of course DEAD" and you're like "DAMMIT, what the hell am I watching????". This movie is exactly like that. It starts with two sisters returning home from a mental institution. Their father is married to a woman who's a real bitch, so you can see straight away that lots and lots of supernatural stuff is going to happen, with the obligatory long-black-haired creepy ghost girl staring at you from under that hair that's covering her face (wonder how she sees anything) and wanting to rip your heart out, put it in the oven and then serve it to her pet iguanodon. But, I'm digressing. Anyway, I was saying, you COULD notice those things if you were paying extreme attention. Of course, I haven't. So, while I got the grip on the characters (heck, how hard can it be? There are only four of them!), their backgrounds and motivation were pretty foggy. And everything went straight to hell when they started introducing other characters (!)
Note, however, that my lack of attention should be blamed on the crappiness of the movie and not on me. The author of the movie made three fatal mistakes: First, there were only two scary scenes (one with opening the door and pulling down the blanket, nice, but it was done much better in Shutter, and the other one was really scary, with that Ringu-like movement and stuff). Both scenes appear relatively early in the movie. It seems like the movie is divided in three parts: 1) Ripping off the classic Japanese ghost story 2) Nothing happens in a very Cubrickian sort of way, with extremely looooooong and slow scenes that, unlike Shining for example, work against the movie (or rather, they work in movie's advantage, since the point of this movie is to induce boredom and frustration). 3) Lots of weird stuff happens, where the author is rubbing his hands with glee and muttering to himself: "Tee hee hee, I rule! Look at that girl under the sink! And all those blood trails! And everyone is acting strange at dinner! And she's locking her in the closet! Hell, I'm better than David Lynch!" Note that, of course, the author of this movie is NOT better than Lynch - you will enjoy most of Lynch's movies, no matter if you understand what's going on or not, because he's kinda good at creating intriguing atmosphere, you know, and besides, he has a habbit of including sex scenes with Laura Anna Harring and Naomi Watts. Anyway, I think we went over the first mistake in detail.
The second mistake is that the sisters show NO KIND of incestuos behavior whatsoever! I don't know what kind of a sick bastard the director is, but he's sure one sick bastard.
The third mistake is of course the aforementioned tendency to make random crap and putting some crappy plot twist that "explains" things. Right.
Oh, I almost forgot about the fourth mistake - the movie is totally uninteresting and often boring. You have been warned. Now it's up to you whether you're going to trust all those high rankings at IMDb and www.kfccinema.com or Dragon's Vampire. I suggest the latter. Just because a movie is crap doesn't mean it's a masterpiece.
Take this movie for example - it's absolutely and completely terrible. One thing that I hate about recent movies is how they put all this bizzarre supernatural Lynchian stuff in, and in the end everything is explained like "this character is MAD, so he's imagining things, this one is schizophrenic, so he also has some problems with reality, this one is being eaten by guilt for cooking his neighbor's cat, this one is of course DEAD" and you're like "DAMMIT, what the hell am I watching????". This movie is exactly like that. It starts with two sisters returning home from a mental institution. Their father is married to a woman who's a real bitch, so you can see straight away that lots and lots of supernatural stuff is going to happen, with the obligatory long-black-haired creepy ghost girl staring at you from under that hair that's covering her face (wonder how she sees anything) and wanting to rip your heart out, put it in the oven and then serve it to her pet iguanodon. But, I'm digressing. Anyway, I was saying, you COULD notice those things if you were paying extreme attention. Of course, I haven't. So, while I got the grip on the characters (heck, how hard can it be? There are only four of them!), their backgrounds and motivation were pretty foggy. And everything went straight to hell when they started introducing other characters (!)
Note, however, that my lack of attention should be blamed on the crappiness of the movie and not on me. The author of the movie made three fatal mistakes: First, there were only two scary scenes (one with opening the door and pulling down the blanket, nice, but it was done much better in Shutter, and the other one was really scary, with that Ringu-like movement and stuff). Both scenes appear relatively early in the movie. It seems like the movie is divided in three parts: 1) Ripping off the classic Japanese ghost story 2) Nothing happens in a very Cubrickian sort of way, with extremely looooooong and slow scenes that, unlike Shining for example, work against the movie (or rather, they work in movie's advantage, since the point of this movie is to induce boredom and frustration). 3) Lots of weird stuff happens, where the author is rubbing his hands with glee and muttering to himself: "Tee hee hee, I rule! Look at that girl under the sink! And all those blood trails! And everyone is acting strange at dinner! And she's locking her in the closet! Hell, I'm better than David Lynch!" Note that, of course, the author of this movie is NOT better than Lynch - you will enjoy most of Lynch's movies, no matter if you understand what's going on or not, because he's kinda good at creating intriguing atmosphere, you know, and besides, he has a habbit of including sex scenes with Laura Anna Harring and Naomi Watts. Anyway, I think we went over the first mistake in detail.
The second mistake is that the sisters show NO KIND of incestuos behavior whatsoever! I don't know what kind of a sick bastard the director is, but he's sure one sick bastard.
The third mistake is of course the aforementioned tendency to make random crap and putting some crappy plot twist that "explains" things. Right.
Oh, I almost forgot about the fourth mistake - the movie is totally uninteresting and often boring. You have been warned. Now it's up to you whether you're going to trust all those high rankings at IMDb and www.kfccinema.com or Dragon's Vampire. I suggest the latter. Just because a movie is crap doesn't mean it's a masterpiece.
posted by Harvester at 3:28 AM
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