Asian horror rocks: Reviews of Shutters, Tell Me Something, and more
If you haven’t yet discovered Asian cinema, I urge you, do.
Not only because the culture of countries like Thailand, Malayasia, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Japan, etc, is so much more like our own desi culture than the western world, but because Asian cinema has truly come of age now.
Take even the most reviled genre, horror.
You’d think that horror films are the tackiest, most tawdry, exploitative, button-pushing, gimmicky, gore-splashing things around. And most of the time, you’d be right.
But Asian cinema has effectively made this genre its own.
While western film makers continue to recycle the tame tired plots and ideas, Asian movie makers have gone into their cultural well to dig out new tropes and concepts – or, at least, new variations on very old cultural tropes.
I’ve been a fan of Asian cinema in general, and horror in particular, for a long time. Long before the recent Ringu craze.
And I’m the least surprised to see that America is the quickest off the block to ‘go Asian’ with remakes coming out of Hollywood studios faster than speeding bullets.
To be fair, the remakes are pretty good too. The Ring, Ring 2, and The Grudge, are all decent rehashes, partly because Hollywood was smart enough to involve the original Japanese creators in the remakes (in the case of The Grudge, the same writer-director helmed the American version as well, bringing interesting changes to his own story).
And, after all, film being what it is, even the Japanese ‘originals’ (if there is such a thing) deviated quite sharply from their own sources, namely the novels on which they based the film versions.
So, for instance, you can read the true original Ring stories in the novels by Koji Suzuki.
The novels are much richer and very different from the film adaptations. Definitely better, in my opinion.
Suzuki’s novel Spiral, not yet adapted into film, is also a brilliant spine-tingler, a must-read for fans of horror fiction looking for something different but good.
In fact, Suzuki’s innovative and daring publishers, Viz Inc., are one of the most dynamic publishers to enter the international market of late.
Dedicated to translations of Japanese fiction, they set up shop in New York a few years ago, and are working hard to overcome the dominance of western fiction in prose novels as well as graphic novels.
I wish them the very best. In fact, I wish an Indian publisher/entrepreneur had the balls to do the same for Indian translated fiction. If not New York, at least set up shop in London and try to balance the lot of Indian ethnic fiction there.
But I digress.
Coming back to Asian horror films, I saw a couple of new ones recently that are worth mentioning.
One was a Korean flick titled ‘Tell me Something’.
It’s a serial killer/cop murder mystery that’s probably the best of its genre I’ve seen in a long while.
And when I saw ‘genre’, I don’t just mean Korean cinema, although that’s doing great things right now too, I mean the thriller film genre in general, be it American, British or any other nationality.
Tell me Something is genuinely hair-raising. The film is about a string of gruesome murders around Seoul.
The murders, which are shown in all their gruesome gory detail, involve cutting off the limbs of victims and mismatching limbs with torsos.
The killer then dumps each mismatched set of body parts in black garbage bags (double strength double-large, I presume!) and delivers them to a place where they’re likely to be found by…the next victim.
The cop assigned to investigate the killings finds a common link: a woman who was involved with each of the dead men (yes, the victims are all male, for a change) at some point.
The woman in question is exceptionally beautiful (really) and very enigmatic.
What follows is a fairly typical cop noir tale, beautifully shot scenarios, much brooding, angst, on the part of the cop, much introverted silence on the part of the woman.
Also predictably, the cop develops an attraction to the woman.
But nothing else about the film is as predictable as you might think.
Sure, there are the usual red herrings, twists and turns, and a shocker of a twist at the end.
But it’s all done with great panache and style.
Beautifully filmed, edited, with a terrific music track – some of the best use of Western Classical music (of all things) in a film I’ve seen of late, let alone an Asian film! – and very well acted by all the leads.
It’s a murder mystery that’ll keep you on your toes for its entire length.
So why do I call it ‘horror’? Well, I don’t. It’s labelled horror because of the extreme gore depicted, which is definitely not meant for your run-of-the-mill murder mystery afficianado.
But if you can stomach those occasional scenes of blood-buckets, this is a tense, gripping, emotionally involving murder thriller that really delivers the goods.
If you’re looking for more supernatural horror, then you can’t do worse than the Thai smash hit, Shutters.
Recommended to me by my old friend and fellow movie addict Madan Lakhani, proprietor of Sai Baba DVD Club, one of the several libraries I’m a member of, it’s a more typical Asian horror flick.
There’s the now-cliche female ghost, complete with chalk-white face, hair streaming over her eyes, and clutching claw-like hands reaching out.
But apart from that cliche, this is a very, very good ghost story/thriller.
What sets Shutters apart from the usual Hollywood product – or even the usual Asian horror product, because there’s plenty of trash in our backyard as well, guys – is its careful, painstaking attention to detail and quality.
The script is brilliantly structured, with chills and thrills coming at you right from the first two minutes, all through to the shocking twist at the end.
The cinematography is terrific, with some really daring shots and set-ups that push the boundary and make the whole experience a pleasure.
The direction, editing, acting are all A-grade, comparable to the best that Hollywood can offer.
And it’s also a very, very good relationship drama, about a young couple trying to hold on to one another through a terribly traumatic series of events.
Shutters is a must-see for anyone who likes a good scare as well as good cinema.
In comparison, the Robert De Niro starrer Hide And Seek was such a major waste of time.
The film is a total rip-off of Hollywood films like Secret Window and The Shining.
De Niro, as always, is watchable. And young Dakota Fanning is exceptional.
Everything else is on par too.
But somehow the film just doesn’t get you the way it should.
I can’t really explain what I mean.
Perform this experiment: See Shutters, and then see Hide And Seek.
And you’ll see what I mean.
Asian horror rocks.
Except, of course, when it’s a desi rip-off of a Korean film, which is what the Urmila Matondkar starrer Naina is.
It’s not a copy of Ju-on as some reviewers mistakenly assumed (only the poster is copied from Ju-on’s poster).
It’s a copy of a Korean film called The Eye. Almost a frame by frame copy.
As for how the desi version compares to the original, the less said the better.
See The Eye too, and The Eye 2! They’re both ten times as good as Naina. And even that’s giving Naina too much credit.
And this is from an Urmila fan.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 10:34 am. It is filed under Ashok.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
