If you’re pregnant, or you’re thinking about getting in the family way, don’t see The Eye 2. If you’re hormonal you’re bound to be pretty freaked out by the graphic, rather disturbing imagery involving fetuses in The Eye 2.

This Hong Kong hit, directed by The Pang Bros. (Danny and Oxide), is a sequel to The Eye in name only. In the first film, a corneal transplant was the catalyst to seeing dead people; in The Eye 2, it’s simply being pregnant (but the story does supposedly mirror an ancient Chinese legend).

Joey Cheng (Shu Qi) is a young woman having an affair with a married man. When she realizes the futility of her situation she attempts suicide by swallowing handfuls of pills in a Bangkok hotel, but she’s discovered just in time and taken to the hospital. It’s there that she begins to suspect she’s pregnant with her lover’s child and finds the will to go on.

Joey’s new-found joy is short-lived when she discovers that the strange alignment of a near-death experience, coupled with the start of a new life, has seemingly opened the door to the netherworld. Everywhere Joey looks, she sees strange apparitions. Most of them are benign, but one tenacious ghost begins to show its true reason for visiting the young mother-to-be: It wants the baby.

The Eye 2 is not as cohesive plot-wise as The Eye, but it’s an entertaining and spooky trip through nine months of a haunted, endangered pregnancy. Most of the film just flows from scene to scene following Joey as she freaks out over the ghosts, but The Pang’s strong visual style rescues The Eye 2 from being just another in a long line of confusing, jumbled Asian horror flicks.

Although it doesn’t compare to The Eye, The Eye 2 is worth a look, at least once.

= = =
Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson