[ZERO]
+ 2nd Worst Movie of the Year
 |
| A lady in a blood-soaked hospital dress dragging herself across the floor makes up this poster for The Pang Brothers' The Eye 2 |
A young, pregnant woman attempts suicide numerous times, because she is heavily plagued by some spirits that she sees regularly.
The Eye 2 is the sequel to Danny and Oxide Pang, 'The Pang Brothers'' 2002 horror The Eye, written by Yuet-Jan Hui (The Eye) with Lawrence Cheng (Encore/Hot Choi (1980)) contributing story elements. This film is often involuntarily comical, and just as you think it cannot possibly deliver any more baloney, it brings you another head-shaking, laugh-inducing sequence. - However, it doesn't give enough fun to win a single heart here and unquestionably belongs in the exclusive grade-zero club of films wholly without merit.
When I was almost sure that The Eye 2 was just about over, it turned out it had another full 35 minutes of absurd nonsense left for me. The hands-down most annoying (but also a bit comical) feature of the film is that all of its women are struck dumb in a kind of impotent state throughout, which leaves them to only react to bad stuff with screaming, crying or - and this is also often the case, - screaming and crying. These emotional bouts are pretty much non-stop throughout the movie. The protagonist, - the only character we really meet, - is the prototype for this seemingly unthinking, eternally sobbing blob of a gender that women are made out to be in The Eye 2.
There are semi-religious elements, such as the heroine wanting to give birth to a reincarnated version of her boyfriend's deceased mother, and ridiculously humorous inventions, such as ghosts flying into the vaginas of women giving birth, (while, of course, they are screaming and crying loudly), - and some of the consistently poor taste of the film may have some cultural motivations lying behind it that I fail to grasp, (it's a Hong Kong/Singapore co-production.)
What is assured absolutely above any cultural differences is that the script, acting, directing and photography here seem like they are taken out of an early film school production. The music sounds like it comes from a bad reality TV show, and the film's shifts in tone are jarring; the editing is choppy, and the general experience seems like just a string of sequences playing one after the other without any sense of a central order of things. The grasp on suspense here is absent and deeply amateurish. The Eye 2 is all bad.
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Cost: Estimated 2.3 mil. $
Box office: In excess of 2.5 mil. $
= Uncertain
[The Eye 2 was released 18 March (Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) and runs 95 minutes. The storyline is not related to that of The Eye, only in that it again is about clairvoyance and the ability to see ghosts. Shooting took place in Singapore, Bangkok, Thailand and in Hong Kong. The film was not released theatrically in North America. The gross listed above of 2.5 mil. $ is the cume of the only three markets that are made public, (Hong Kong, Italy and Thailand), of which Hong Kong makes up the biggest part with 1.2 mil. $. But the film was released in 13 other markets and 3 festivals, so this is not a complete gross. The Eye 3 (2005) takes the franchise in a horror-comedy direction, again made by The Pang Brothers. The Eye (2008) is a bad US remake with Jessica Alba. Danny Pang returned with Leave Me Alone/Ah Ma Yau Nan (2004) and Oxide Pang with Ab-normal Beauty/Sei Mong Se Jun (2004). 8,648 users at Rotten Tomatoes have given The Eye 2 a 3.2/5 rating.]
What do you think of The Eye 2?
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