(2010) ***
When an unstable political situation in Bangkok leads to rioting in the streets, airports are shutdown, forcing a group of vacationing friends to seek refuge in an immense, low-budget hotel. Following the disappearance of the male members of the group, a little girl informs their girlfriends that the missing boys were taken away by a ghost only her dog is able to see.
Stupidly the girls decide to look around the cavernous hotel separately. Before long they are plagued by otherworldly happenings including this freaky boy-dog,
as well as an angry ghost,
The Child’s Eye is the latest installment in the Pang Brothers long running Eye series (i.e. Eye, Eye 2, Eye 10) and is by far the strangest. In 2002 The Eye was an extremely effective horror movie with some excellent, jolting scares (the elevator scene still gets to me). Ten years later similar scares feel stale and dated. The setting is terrific although the layout of the hotel is puzzling, sometimes appearing posh and other times looking like a warehouse from the SAW films. A surreal third reel trip into a computer generated fantasy world might have looked good in 3D but ultimately comes off as silly in its two dimensional counterpart. Like most of the J-horror films from the past decade the vengeful spirit has good reason to be angry but at this point I don’t really care anymore.
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