I'm unable to watch this all the way through because the jiggling camera induced a migraine of Biblical proportions, but the pattern is clear anyway.
Two honeymooners, Tim Chiou and Amy Smart, are being driven by an older man named Ping to a remote village but Ping gets lost and stops the car in a spot that is close to a haunted village, or so he says. He leaves the car to get direction and disappears.
Chiou and Smart squirm with impatience and finally exit the vehicle themselves to retrieve Ping. The structures in the village are all dark, as is everything else, and the only light comes from Chiou's flashlight.
I give the film points for its attempt at hybridization, crossing the cheap American horror movie with a Chinese milieu. I also give it points for being brave enough to try such a stunt on a budget that would not have provided a month's worth of gerbil food.
And that's about it. It doesn't appear to me that the dialog was more than just sketched in. Much of the dialog sounds improvised, in the way that John Cassavetes' dialog was improvised, a way that never held any appeal for me -- "What do you mean?" "What do you mean, 'what do you mean?'" Sometimes improvisation can be successfully pulled off when you're using someone who knows his business. Try Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris." But here, neither of the two principles is able to pull it off.
And that wobbling, hand-held camera! I curse the day MTV was born.
Two honeymooners, Tim Chiou and Amy Smart, are being driven by an older man named Ping to a remote village but Ping gets lost and stops the car in a spot that is close to a haunted village, or so he says. He leaves the car to get direction and disappears.
Chiou and Smart squirm with impatience and finally exit the vehicle themselves to retrieve Ping. The structures in the village are all dark, as is everything else, and the only light comes from Chiou's flashlight.
I give the film points for its attempt at hybridization, crossing the cheap American horror movie with a Chinese milieu. I also give it points for being brave enough to try such a stunt on a budget that would not have provided a month's worth of gerbil food.
And that's about it. It doesn't appear to me that the dialog was more than just sketched in. Much of the dialog sounds improvised, in the way that John Cassavetes' dialog was improvised, a way that never held any appeal for me -- "What do you mean?" "What do you mean, 'what do you mean?'" Sometimes improvisation can be successfully pulled off when you're using someone who knows his business. Try Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris." But here, neither of the two principles is able to pull it off.
And that wobbling, hand-held camera! I curse the day MTV was born.