When discussing cinema Hideo Nakata's Ring will be remembered as the film that set off the boom in Asian horror. Mind you, the only people who will be discussing this aspect of cinema will be weirdos like me but it will still be discussed. Some of the slew of movies that came after the success of the Ring tried to obviously capture lightning in a bottle by copying Nakata's film while other films were trying to do their own thing and had the bad fortune of following a popular film. All the films, whether they deserved to be or not, end up getting lumped into the category of Asian horror. I'm guilty of that same sort of route categorization by reviewing both The Eye and A Tale of Two Sisters together but I feel they both either comment upon Ring or might not have been made without a previous genre film being such a money maker.

The Eye [Jian gui] is a film by the sibling directorial tag team of Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang. This is totally unrelated to the movie but I think "Oxide" is a great name. Anyway, the story concerns the blind since birth Wong Kar Mun [Angelica Lee or Lee Sin-je] receiving a cornea transplant. At first things go great for the young woman as she acclimates with incredible speed to being able to see. Thing is, Mun ends up being able to see too well and the corneas that were donated to her allow her to see restless spirits, ghosts and other assorted unworldly things. That's right, she can see dead people.

Naturally Mun is a little upset by this side effect of her surgery. Incredibly, she somehow seems even more distraught over the fact that she can no longer play the violin in the blind orchestra she used to belong to but is now over qualified for. One of the few people who believes the story about her plight is Dr. Wah [Lawrence Chou], the therapist who is helping her adjust to having vision for the first time in her life. Since he can't do anything about that bizarre violin sub-plot he decides to see what he can do about the whole visions of the dead thing. While that is going above and beyond his stated job description Dr. Wah does have more than a professional interest in Mun motivating him. I certainly can't blame the guy for falling for a woman who looks like Angelica Lee I do wonder about the ethics of it. Just working on trying to gain mastery of an entirely new sense would be enough to leave most people feeling a little emotionally fragile, never mind having ghosts hassling you every time you turn around. As an authority figure in Mun's life should Dr. Wah be hitting on her? I'm not sure what the professional ethics are in a matter like this but I get the feeling our man Wah doesn't know what they are either. There have been times I've complained in the past about a romance getting unnecessarily shoe-horned into a Western adaptation of Eastern horror story but those have nothing on the sappy and slightly patronizing Mun/Wah relationship.

The Eye is another entry in that long, strange horror film sub-genre of haunted body parts. I can't say I have an inherent fear that parts of my body are going to take on a life of their own so I'm really not sure where this particular niche is coming from. A small scale version of the Frankensteinian horror of science unbound? Is it the fear of outside influences overtaking your life manifested as a section of your body being taken out of your control? I don't know but at least Mun doesn't have a haunted hand and is spared the indignity of having to wrestle her own arm.

Much like Mun's transplanted corneas, The Eye is made up of many different parts that don't function quite the way they should. Eh, that comparison didn't quite work but, then again, neither does The Eye. That's not to say it's all bad; Lee does a good job of projecting Mun's sense of dread and some of the scares are well done. But there's nothing in the film you haven't seen done before and probably done better. Although The Eye may not be as bad as the hopelessly derivative Ju-On/The Grudge it still has plenty of "tributes" to other films whether it's The Sixth Sense or, of all things, The Fast and the Furious. In the end The Eye isn't disappointing because it's bad, it's disappointing because it could have been so much better.

A Tale of Two Sisters [Janghwa, Hongryeon] is, as the title suggests, the story of Soo-mi [Su-jeong Lim] and her younger sister Soo-yeon [Geun-yeong Mun]. I won't discuss the plot at length since part of the experience of the movie is the continuing process of revelation but the story starts out with the two sisters returning home after an undisclosed illness to a seemingly distant father [Kap-su Kim] and an angry, bizarre step mother [Jung-ah Yum]. What starts out as an uncomfortable situation gets increasingly strange and horrific until the big secret of what is going on is revealed... and then things get worse.

One thing that I loved about Two Sisters is that the "twist" ending happens about two thirds of the way into the movie. At first glance this could be seen as yet another nod to M. Night Shyamalan and his obsession with stories that upend themselves but in Two Sisters it doesn't feel like a cheap ruse so much as a part of the story that hadn't been fully illuminated up until that point. The director Ji-woon Kim doesn't make the entire movie hinge on a plot gimmick but instead makes it flow as just one more part of the story. I'm not sure if this was a conscious decision in order to not make the movie feel like an exercise in setting up a hoped for shocking payoff or if it's because the movie is based on a Korean fairy tale that the primary audience would doubtlessly be familiar with but either way the decision works.

Speaking of source material for the movie, after watching the film I was left wondering what elements came from the original story and what was an invention of the screenplay. The film felt like a complete work so I didn't feel something had been lost in the translation but I enjoyed the story to such a degree that I wondered about the changes and similarities. As of the time of me writing this I'm not certain -yes, I'm writing my paper without doing my homework- but I will investigate it later. Was there a shift in the theme of the story or just minor things like an updating of the setting? Did the original have even more ghosts and supernatural elements?

In addition to everything else Two Sisters managed to find time to include some ghosts as well. If there is one thing that this trend of Asian horror has brought to the world it's an updating of the vengeance fueled female spirit. From movie to movie, the long, black hair hanging down over their face, the staggering gait and all the other hallmarks of a woman who is still alive after death are there. The case could be made that the film makers are drawing from the same classical sources instead of pulling their inspiration from The Ring but I have yet to see a post-Ring movie where the ghosts don't show up with a similar sounding creepy electronic soundtrack. When viewed as a group I'm also impressed how lucky the ghost women were that none of them tinted their hair or bleached it while they were alive. Those ghosts just wouldn't be as menacing if they had pretty red highlights.

While the ghosts in Two Sisters may have a familiar visual style to them the way they are implemented into the story is unique. The ghosts in Two Sisters are, as weird as it sounds, almost auxiliary characters. When dead people are still up and moving around it's usually a pretty big deal but the argument could be made that the spirits in Two Sisters are manifestations of guilt more than anything. Having a ghost movie that doesn't focus on the ghosts is a pretty gutsy move but Twin Sisters successfully manages to defy expectations.

Instead of falling into the rut that so many movies in this loosely defined sub-genre have succumbed to Twin Sisters manages to both expand and transcend the Asian horror ghetto and creates an entirely new genre: Korean Gothic. Odds are I'll end up writing a review that discusses all the yet to be made movies that are going to get stuck into this genre soon.

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