#82 - The Eye 2

Gin Gwai 2 (2004)
Fairly Tasteful
Directed by: Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang. Written by: Jojo Hui.

Plot: A young woman (Qi Shu) has a near death experience after discovering that she is pregnant and gains the ability to see ghosts, who are trying to enter the bodies of unborn babies in order to be born again. She also finds herself being followed around by one ghost in particular (Eugenia Yuan, who freaked the fucking hell out of me in this movie) who seems to have some sort of beef with her.

Review: ‘Why Eye 2 rather than Eye 1?’ you may well ask. Well, I actually thought this movie was better done, more interesting and scarierthan it's... uh... precursor?. It’s weird but I don’t find loss or absence of vision that disturbing, even though one of my ever present fears is going blind or, even worse, being able to see but not well (there is Retinitis Pigmentosa in my family and supposedly it’s hereditary so there is a chance of this happening). I’m much more disturbed by the idea of going totally nuts if I get pregnant. Pregnant women are scary. Very, very scary.

I hate these pregnancy movies, they always really gross me out. The absolute worst for disgustingness for me is, of course, Alien, followed closely by Rosemary’s Baby. Gah. I’m haunted by the idea of an undeveloped fetus, like, crawling out and… I dunno, walkin around and shit. Fucking hell. I think about this a lot. I’m never going to get pregnant. Never ever ever. It’s just unnatural.

So there’s that whole factor. There was a lot of other scary shit in this movie, things with lots and lots of long black hair found in most Asian horror flicks. Even though it's been done to death, that stuff still really disturbs me. God.

Moving on, this movie was not slick, unlike a lot of American remakes of Asian horror flicks (this one hasn’t been remade as yet, thank God, although the first one has so who knows). It looked kind of low budget and the picture quality kind of sucked (that may just have been the copy I watched, I guess) but it was way scarier and often much more shocking than most stuff that gets made over on this side of the Pacific. All that weird movement and stuff really gets to me. For example, Jacob’s Ladder fucked me up big time. That’s probably the last time I actually flipped my shit while watching a movie. It was fucking stupid but it scared the sweet living fuck out of me.

Moving on again, I also thought Qi Shu was really very convincing. That’s pretty much half the battle for me anyway. If an actor acts scared well enough, I become scared. Not that Lee Sin-je wasn’t convincing in the first movie, she really was, it’s just that Qi Shu was extra convincing and it was totally unnerving.

Yup, pretty scary ghost movie, although it's not actually that traumatizing, so if you want to watch a flick that doesn't permanently destroy your ability to function in certain situations (I still don't like going in strange houses or watching unmarked videotapes), this is the flick for you. Or something. And you don't have to watch the first movie for this to make sense. The two are connected in theme but this is not a continuation of the story.

Favourite Part: Qi Shu gets into a taxi with a woman who has no face. In fact, her head doesn’t even have a front. Her head has two backs, like, there’s a braid on either side, if you follow. Qi Shu freaks out (as well she should) in a very convincing manner and the whole thing is all sort of nauseating. Fucking freaked the hell out of me. I still haven’t gotten over it.

Other versions: None.

Sequels: Follows The Eye. Followed by The Eye 3.

Click here to read my original review (February 24th, 2007).

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