Horror film remake, ‘The Eyes,’ proves not worth seeing
1 out of 4 stars
Posted on February 4, 2008
Once again we are exposed to a remake of an Asian horror movie with “The Eye.” Not only are the movies that they call “scary movies” not scary anymore, but they are all exactly the same. If you have seen “The Ring,” “The Grudge,” “Dark Water” or any other movie of that type, you have already seen “The Eye.”
In this remake of the original “Jian Gui,” Jessica Alba stars as Sydney Wells in the creepy tale of a blind violin player who has cornea transplants that restore her sight. While trying to get used to seeing the world again, Sydney seems to see something else as well. Something horrible. She can see dead people and what appears to be some kind of Grim Reaper character hauling them off to wherever dead people in movieland go. She tries to figure out how, why and what is going on with her new eyes, while everyone else seems to think she’s losing it and is just afraid of having her sight back.
Alba delivers a note-worthy performance but it just so happens to be in the most generic, typical movie. It’s all loud sounds and quick camera movements. Why does Hollywood continue to make these awful PG-13 horror remakes?
The fact that it is a remake of an overseas movie makes it bad, but this one also has a few more problems that lie just within this particular horror flick. Alba’s character gets her sight back in the beginning of the movie but it takes her over half an hour to get focus back. The two directors of this motion picture (David Moreau and Xavier Palud) thought it would be a good idea to show us what’s she’s going through by blurring the images. This gets old fast and actually makes your own eyes hurt after a while. After rubbing your eyes for most of the evening you get to the climax of the movie. It’s lame, anticlimactic and just plain stupid.
If Americans can’t come up with anything better than remaking horror films from the ’80s or from overseas, we should just stop altogether.
