Silk
(Tartan/Thai/DTS/Horror)
Picture:
C Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C
Writer/director
Su Chao-Pin’s Silk (2006) takes all
the clichés of lost zombie children, hands out of bathtubs, doppelgangers and
other silly, played out Asian Horror moments and thinks “remixing” them and
doing them with variation somehow makes them work. He is so wrong it is not even funny, nor is
anything in this mess of a film.
At first,
you think he can work through the clichés than build on them something new and
unexpected. When one young man suddenly
urinates in the middle of the sidewalk, that was trouble, but when he is doing
so through the ghost of a younger child following him that he does not see,
that was the end. Then things got
worse. Fortunately, the 109 minutes ends
before things bottom out, but if it had gone on any longer, we would have had a
nightmare of a different kind.
The anamorphically
enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is very soft and flat, despite being a recent
production. Arthur Wong Ngok Tai, H.K.S.C.,
recreates all the kinds of shots we have already seen in such films and as for
the sound, even the DTS 5.1 mix shows that multi-channel sound was not
conceived for this film originally despite all of its sweetened jumping
sounds. Extras include deleted scenes
& alternate endings that make no difference, outtakes, the original trailer
and a making of program.
- Nicholas Sheffo
