Abnormal Beauty - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

                                                            

In the movie Abnormal Beauty Race Wong plays Jiney, a gifted but troubled art student who has a strained relationship with her mother and becomes fascinated with photos of dead or dying animals which start to lead her off the deep end towards filming dead people.  After an intervention and some help from her VERY close friend Jas (played by Rosanne Wong) Jiney's disposition improves until she starts receiving videotapes of women being brutally killed.  Who is this sadistic stranger and what does want with Jiney?

          Filmed in Hong Kong, Abnormal Beauty is above most Asian slasher fare.  The production and story are both above the norm and the pace of the movie keeps it from lagging in on area too long.  There are some pretty ugly torture scenes towards the end but is typical for this genre and is nothing that hasn't been shown before in most Asian  thriller/horror films.  For the Asian horror enthusiast I recommend this movie.   

I Saw The Devil

                                                                        
   I viewed I Saw the Devil last night and was pretty floored.  This South Korean film of revenge puts a new twist on vengeance; instead of getting one’s revenge at one time, why not parcel it out a little at a time?

          After his pregnant fiancé is brutally butchered by a serial killer Kyung Chul (played by Min-sik Choi), secret agent Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-hun Lee) goes looking for revenge with the help of his fiancé’s father.  Kim Soo devises a way to get revenge over time and seeks the killer responsible.  Min-sik Choi, who has also starred in Lady Vengeance and Oldboy, is brilliant as the deranged madman and Byung-hun Lee is very convincing as the mourning boyfriend.  This movie ranges towards the more hardcore side of Asian horror and not for the faint of heart but if you enjoy movies such as Lady Vengeance then this movie is for you.

An Education at Haunted Universities

I watched another movie from Thailand called Haunted Universities (2009).  It a series of three stories of revenge that are loosely tied together by a university and an medical examiner assistant that has the ability to converse with ghosts.  The first two segments of movie didn’t have the more “gory” aspects of Thai movie such as Sick Nurses and leans more toward Japanese Horror.  The final segment returns to the Thai type of horror and was hard to watch in one section and I was really glad when the killer got what he deserved.  While this isn’t a movie to cut one’s teeth with in the foreign horror genre, it is entertaining when put into it’s context of a good, B grade, Asian horror movie.   

Beware of Dark Water

Sorry about the extended period between postings-things have been pretty hectic.  I will try not to let so much time go by again.

          Right now I am watching one of my favorite Asian horror movies ever, Dark Water.  When Yoshimi wins her custody battle over her daughter she tries to become self-sufficient again by finding a job and an apartment.  The apartment she and her daughter, Ikuko, decide on winds up having a, leaky roof, a dark past, and a scary little girl lurking around.

          I enjoy this movie immensely because it deals with real life situations – ugly custody battles, the hardship of being a single parent, and the guilt of not being the “perfect parent”.  Hitomi Kuroki portrays a stressed out mother and ex-wife pushed to the breaking point brilliantly, Rio Kanno is perfect as her 6 year old daughter, and the rest of the cast are a step above the typical horror movie cast.  The cinematography is above par; all of which makes this original far superior to the American remake and one of the best in Asian cinema.