The Child's Eye

The Pang Brothers

The story: Rainie (Rainie Yang) hopes that a trip to Bangkok will improve the rocky situation with her boyfriend Lok (a glum Shawn Yue). Two other couples join them. When protests break out, they are trapped in the city and are forced to put up at a dodgy, dingy hotel with a brusque owner (Lam Ka Tung). Strange things begin to happen, then Rainie’s friends start disappearing. She has only a little girl and her dog to rely on for help.

The movie goes to hell at the conclusion of the story. Too bad it does not do so earlier since its vision of the underworld is the most distinctive thing about this otherwise pedestrian horror thriller.

Directors and co-writers the Pang brothers imagine Hades as a smoky, smouldering inferno composed of the paper offerings of houses, cars and such that people dedicate to the deceased at traditional Chinese funerals.

It is a visually witty and different take on the netherworld but one that probably would have worked equally well in regular 2-D.

The Child’s Eye comes right on the heels of The Shock Labyrinth: House Of Horrors, the first Japanese life-action 3-D flick. But as Asian film-makers rush to embrace the technology, they also need to keep in mind that it is no longer such a novelty that any 3-D offering will automatically draw a crowd of curious moviegoers.

Already, some of the showcased 3-D sequences here – a bullet flying into the audience, a disembodied hand reaching out – feel lazy and cliched.

Such cheap thrills make the film seem stuck in theme park-attraction mode (remember Captain EO starring the late Michael Jackson at Disney theme parks?).

Part of the problem is that The Child’s Eye is very much a standard horror picture with too many familiar elements, from a chair moving ominously on its own to creepy-looking children.

The upheaval in Bangkok at the beginning anchor the film in reality but, unfortunately, it does not have anything to do with what follows. The attempt at keeping things believable is later completely abandoned and the movie plunges into full-blown haunted house territory.

Also, the music score was rather intrusive and the most effective scene, sound-wise, was one which simply used the ambient sounds of a laundry room.

It is all rather disappointing given that the Pang brothers had previously helmed The Eye (2002), which was more successful at conjuring up a sustained atmosphere of dread and foreboding. It helped that Malaysian actress Angelica Lee was in the title role.

Taiwanese singer and idol drama star Rainie Yang comes off worse in the comparison between the two leads as she is unable to summon the same level of emotional intensity. She is more like the petulant cutie-pie in some, well, idol drama having a minor crisis that has been blown out of proportion.

That, though, might be more than enough to scare the living daylights out of some people.

(ST)