MeisterPlanet

Tonight’s DVD happened to be The Eye, a Hong Kong produced movie due to hit your local video store on October 21st, 2003. The movie, staring Angelica Lee and Lawrence Chou, produces much of the same creepy imagery that one would find in other recent Asian horror movies such as Ringu, which eventually spawned the American made The Ring.

The story revolves around Mun, who has been blind since she was two-years-old. As the film begins, she receives a cornea transplant at age twenty, which will give her the gift of sight again. As the film progresses, Mun must learn how to reuse a sense that many around her have had all of their lives. While she tries to understand the objects that take shape around her, there is also a sense of unease because there are things she begins to see or thinks she sees that defy logic.

When an elderly woman in the hospital rises from her bed and is accompanied out of the room by a shadow only to be announced as dead in the morning. Mun attempts to investigate the oddity as best she can. Since there is no way to understand yet if what she sees represents any real danger to her, she keeps the incident to herself. The strange occurrences continue once she’s released from the hospital and eventually drive her to seek help from her psychotherapist, Dr. Wah. At first skeptical, Dr. Wah soon begins to realize that there is more going on than anybody realizes and that Mun’s sight came at a price and with a mystery.

From there, a number of plot twists take place, and I won’t reveal them here, but suffice it to say there are many scenes that will provide some good chills for those patient enough to take in the different pace this film takes as a foreign import. The movie itself isn’t what I would qualify as a straight horror movie, though there is a high “creepiness” level around it, along with a number of downright scary scenes. If anything, this movie is perhaps closer in feel to “The Sixth Sense” than many of the other movies you may see in this Halloween month.

The film is in Cantonese with English subtitles and is in widescreen presentation.

Now that some time has passed since the initial release of The Matrix Reloaded, I felt it was a perfect night to gather together several pieces of the Matrix related media and see how they all pan out together. This means I managed to watch, in a single evening, The Matrix, followed by The Animatrix with The Matrix Reloaded and finally a downloaded copy of the in-game movies from the game Enter the Matrix.

I must say that time, along with having access to the other sources for what is the middle part of the story, has helped erase any real disappointment I had with the second film.

For those that don’t know, all three of you, The Animatrix and Enter The Matrix not only carry Matrix-related story elements, but direct plot elements referenced by the second movie. From these you discover such expanded elements such as who “the kid” is and why he’s fixated on Neo, what the Osirus was and what they sacrificed to get their information to the others and even the reason Neo didn’t just fly off at the first sign of multiple Smiths instead of fighting all of them for as long as he did.