Extras: Trailer, Making Of, Asia Extreme Trailer Reel
Director:
Oxide and Danny Pang
(Abnormal Beauty, Bangkok Dangerous, Bangkok Haunted, The Eye, The Eye 2, The Eye 10, The Messengers, One Take Only, The Tesseract, Who Is Running?)
Producers:
Peter Chan, Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui,Nonzee Nimibutr and Lawrence Cheng
Screenplay:
Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui and Lawrence Cheng
Original Score :
Orange Music
Cast :
Joey Cheng: Qi Shu
Sam: Jesdaporn Pholdee
Yuen Chi-Kei: Eugenia Yuan
Monk: Philip Kwok
Policewoman: May Phua
Gynaecologist: Rayson Tan
Policeman: Alan Tern
Policeman 2: San Yow
Joey (Qi Shu, right) is a very disturbed young woman.
She's on permanent self-destruct because she can't handle rejection. As things stand when we first see
her, she's about to commit suicide one more time in a bid to be successful, but thankfully fails (and
the resultant stomach-pumping scene is pretty gross). What makes things worse for her, in her current
plight, is that she's pregnant and the father of the child, her ex-boyfriend, doesn't want to know
about her although what will be going through his mind once he does know the facts isn't something I
would want to spoil in this review.
The Eye 2 is obviously the sequel to
The Eye,
but the two stories are entirely separate. However, the prospect of seeing ghosts is the recurring
theme and there's plenty on view here, the first ones appearing as Joey wakes in her hotel room from
her first suicide attempt. It makes you wonder whether she's mentally unstable or are the ghosts,
in fact, for real, as she is moved to another room in the hotel and goes to check out why, finding
some kind of exorcism ritual being performed to cleanse the room, as she hides further down the
corridor. When she asks a cleaner what's happening, she's told how the ghosts come when someone tries
to kill themselves... but you'll see there's more to it than that.
As she goes about her life in the months from conception to giving birth, there's many a moment where
she's desperately trying to help people or, at least, point them in the right direction, given the
info she's learned from a Buddhist monk and her bid to understand what's going on, but to the layman
it just comes across as if she's totally lost the plot, so she's on a loser from the start but there's
always hope things will come good in the end.
It's difficult to expand on the film further without giving spoilers, but thanks to the tight direction
and exceptional acting from Qi Shu, The Eye 2 is absolutely fucking mind-blowing stuff. After
you've watched this, with all its clever and simple visuals mixed with phenomenal sound FX, you'll most
likely be a similar bag of nerves to Joey by the end of the movie.
It's worth 10/10 because it really delivers on its scares, it fully qualifies the reasons given for
everything that happens and it completely avoids the trap some films could suffer of being given a
cop-out ending and transcending that to give it the perfect ending it needs. Outstanding!
And after watching this, I see the Pang brothers have made a third film, The Eye 10. I want
it out on DVD now!
The Pang brothers make full use of the entire 1.85:1 widescreen frame, causing even a drab hospital
to look like something you can't take your eyes off as you never know where the next shock could
come from. The print is superb and is flawless.
Full credit goes to the soundmix as, unlike the first film which just had a Dolby Surround track, here
we're treated to both a Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtrack. I always go for the latter when given
the option and you'll experience incredible split-surround effects and heavy bass for the oodles of
scary moments which are delivered with a genuine feel - something that so rarely comes out of modern-day
filmmaking. Let's just hope Hollywood doesn't try and remake THIS series and then fuck it up like
they routinely do!
The only disappointment comes in the scant extras. The Behind The Scenes Documentary (14 mins)
has interview snippets with the two director - the Pang Brothers, its lead and other crew members telling
of how some of the ideas in the film came about. Interesting stuff, but something that you'll only watch once.
There's also a Trailer (3 mins), but don't, whatever you do, watch the trailer before the film
itself otherwise you'll spoil so many surprises as it really contains far too much that should be left
for you to see later.
Aside from that there's just trailers for other Asia Extreme titles from Tartan - Battle Royale 2,
Internal Affairs 1, 2 & 3, Sky Blue, Oldboy and Freezer.
There are subtitles in English only (except for on the odd occasion when English is actually spoken during
the film - which I found a bit disconcerting as I wasn't expecting it), plus the option to remove them
which is good as a video would have to have them burned into the print, just 16 chapters, and a short
piece of the music and CGI on the main menu, exhibiting something similar to what Joey sees at some point
in the movie.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
Joey (Qi Shu, right) is a very disturbed young woman.
The Pang brothers make full use of the entire 1.85:1 widescreen frame, causing even a drab hospital
to look like something you can't take your eyes off as you never know where the next shock could
come from. The print is superb and is flawless.