Aiiiiieeee! My Casserole! | Jessica Alba confronts a scary, scary haunted oven in The Eye.
THE EYE
Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud. Starring: Jessica Alba, Alessandro Nivola, Parker Posey. Now playing.
1 Star
The Japanese like their scary movies. They pretty much revolutionized the horror flick and, as with all good ideas, Western culture appropriated it, remaking all of the Japanese classics at a pace that even Takashi Miike or Kiyoshi Kurosawa would envy. Instead of going for the good old grossout like Western slasher flicks, Japanese horror movies tend to be more supernatural in theme, generating scares with shadows instead of splatter, taking places in houses filled with ghostly children instead of torture chambers. (That said, there are some good Japanese gaggers out there—check out Tetsuo: The Iron Man someday.)
But for some reason, when Americans try to recreate the eerie J-horror aesthetic, they almost always fail.
Which brings me to The Eye. Now, I’ve sat through a lot of horror movies over the last few years. The Ring, The Grudge, The Ring 2, The Grudge 2, Dark Water, One Missed Call, Pulse: I’ve watched them all, originals and remakes alike. And I can say with some authority that The Eye is easily one of the worst of the bunch, in both languages. (Okay, it’s not technically J-horror, having been made in Hong Kong, but it adheres to the J-horror formula so much that it hardly matters that the characters are speaking Mandarin and Cantonese.) And I’ve got to ask: why oh why, you beautiful monster we call Hollywood, would you remake a movie that sucked this badly even before you got your hands on it?
The Eye is the story of Sydney (Jessica Alba), a successful violinist who has been blind since a childhood accident. After receiving a corneal transplant (if it seems I’m moving a little fast, I’m not—the movie speeds through all this exposition even before the credits are over), Sydney begins to see strange and unexplained shapes and figures. The doctors chalk the hallucinations up to sensory overload, but Sydney soon figures out that these figures are in fact the spirits of the recently deceased, who become visible to her as they make their way from one plane of existence to another. Her whiny sister (played by the extremely out-of-place Parker Posey) and unhelpful therapist (Alessandro Nivola) try to convince her that it’s all in her head, but Sydney knows the truth. Somehow her new eyes let her see dead people, and she needs to know why.
Poking them with a pencil.
De-veining them with a shrimp fork.
Paying a hobo to urinate in them.
Blending a cactus into a lumpy purée, mixing in some cat hair and fingernail clippings, and shooting this chunky concoction directly into them with a syringe.
These were some of the things I would rather be doing to my own eyes then sitting through the last 20 minutes of this movie.
Directed with the same quality and care as an episode of The Kids of Degrassi Street, The Eye looks like it was shot through gauze, and not just the portions that are meant to show us what Sydney is seeing. That said, the decision to shoot certain “creepy” scenes from Sydney’s perspective is a huge miscalculation: the audience is forced to blink along with Sydney while she tries to recognize the new, dark, and blurry world that surrounds her. The discoveries are overwhelming to her, extremely annoying to us.
No scares here, just a warmed-over version of a movie that was a waste of eyesight in the first place.
