cover


This movie is available for purchase at www.hkflix.com

HKFlix


Rating:

4


Year of release: 2004

Genre: ghost/suspense

Director: Chu Yen-Ping

Stars: Ya An, Shan-Wai Chang

Not rated; contains IIB-level violence and language


DVD Information

Company: New Generation

Format: widescreen

Languages: Mandarin

Subtitles: Chinese/English (electonically embedded)

Extras: none

Notes: The subtitles are horrible, but the picture and sound transfer is nicely done.


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The Army

The Army

The Army is the story of four recruits who are assigned to a base that is supposed to be haunted, since it was used by the Japanese during World War II for the torture and killing of Chinese prisoners. Though they regard the spooky happenings as a joke at first, soon the paranormal nature of the events around them becomes apparent. After one of the recruits is seriously hurt, the others find a strange link to the past that explains why they have been brought to this particular place.

Given the subject matter, cover art, and Chu Yen-Ping's involvement -- the director who has given us gleefully goofy movies like Fantasy Mission Force -- this particular semi-drunken reviewer thought The Army might be some sort of splat-tastic gore-fest expolitation flick. Sadly, it's just your run of the mill Chinese ghost movie. The Army's biggest problem is that it lays out so many fake scares during most of its' running time (e.g., animals popping out of the darkness or one of the characters posing as a ghost) that when it tries to be serious during the last half-hour, the intended effect falls flat.

The Army

Sure, the movie looks good, and it does deliver some cheap PG13-esque spooky bits. There is a section of the movie that is actually pretty creepy, despite the movie as a whole being more cheese-filled than your average Packers fan. Case in point: the main characters are supposed to be army recruits, but they sport more hair gel on their well-coifed noggins than your average Bravo prime-time lineup. It's hard to take a suspense movie seriously when it can't even get the basic details right.

And any momentum that The Army has going is killed by the big plot twist. Well, actually, the first one is decent and fits in with the movie, but the second -- yes, I said second -- feels totally unnecessary and tacked on just for the sake of trying to screw with the viewer's head. In the end, the viewer does get screwed with, but not in a good way. Even the most die-hard fans of the "I see dead people" types of movies won't find too much of value here.

The Army