Eye 3 (aka, Gin Gwai 10)
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To coincide with the release of the 2008 Jessica Alba version of The Eye, the third movie in the Asian film series is being reissued on DVD. In it, the 10 ways in which the dead can contact the living are explored and gored, Pang Brothers-style.
While there's no doubt the spook-styled siblings have drunk this well so dry it tastes like a mouthful of Ovaltine crystals, The Eye 3 isn't half-bad. Bearing in mind that it has as little to do with the first Eye movie (the one starring Angelica Lee, about a woman who gets a corneal transplant and starts seeing ghosties and ghoulies, all with unfinished biz in the manner of The Sixth Sense), this one is a decent enough fright show.
After a brief intro piece, the story starts rolling crowded-round-the-campfire style, with a group of hip yet irritating teens and 20-somethings telling tales of things that go bump (and bebopping) in the night. Scenarios play out, each one its own little story about how the dead dial-up the living. Here's how it works:
The Top Ten Ways to Meet a Ghost
- Organ transplant from a donor who is psychic (The Eye)
- Attempting suicide while pregnant (The Eye 2).
- Dallying with a Ouija board.
- Tapping chopsticks on an empty bowl to attract famished phantoms.
- Playing hide and seek in the dead of night.
- Rubbing the dirt into your eyes.
- Opening an umbrella inside the house.
- Staring into a mirror at midnight.
- Bending over as if to kiss your butt goodbye.
- Dressing up in funerary finery.
While The Eye 3 definitely isn't scary, it's somewhat inventive and carries the signature visual style of its directors, saturated with color cues and imbued with jump-jolts. It's also got the usual unintended goofiness and sophomoric silliness that's the mark of many an A-horror, but if you're in the mood for a light, reasonably fast-paced time-waster, you could do worse than The Eye 3 (The Eye remake, for example).
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson