The Heirloom (Taiwan/2005)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: B     Extras: C     Film: C

 

 

Ghosts stories are hard to do, especially after so many bad ones.  Taiwan has another emerging cinema and Leste Chen’s The Heirloom (2005) is as much a drama as ghost story, with a twist you would never get in a Hollywood film:  mass suicides and the ghosts of dead fetuses coming back to haunt the next generation!

 

Well cats and acted, the film starts with the lead young lady (Teri Kwan) arriving at a house with high hopes, but considering it dwarfs her and this is a Horror film, trouble is ahead.  Unfortunately for us, it is not enough and the film plays like a drama that wants to be a character study, but is too busy trying to be scary and not doing that too well.  At least it is not as obnoxious as Jan De Bont’s atrocious remake of The Haunting or M. Night Shyamalan’s grossly overrated Sixth Sense, but it is miles away from something like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and a cycle of great haunted house films too numerous to go into here.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image was shot by Kwan Pun-Leung and though some of the color has been toned down, it is not as gutted out as most films in the genre of late.  There are limits in the detail, but it is watchable and consistent enough a transfer, though the flickering film footage is more like a Music Video gimmick.  The 5.1 mix in Dolby Digital and especially DTS are good, with the DTS being warmer, richer and having more presence.  Extras include audio commentary by the makers, a making of program, deleted scenes, the trailer for this and

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo