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14 years ago: A girl fell from the ferris wheel of an amusement park
& died. Shortly thereafter, a clown of the amusementpark hanged
himself, on exactly the same ferris wheel ... Now: Siblings Yen (Bobo
Chan) & Alan (Edwin Siu), who were still kids when all of this had
happened, are still plagued by nightmares, that seem just a bit too rreal
for comfort. & so Alan decides to check out the amusement park once
more ... & there he disappears. Yen figures she has to go look for
her brother & sahe gathers a group of friends: Ka-ho (Jonathan
Cheung), Shan (Matthew Paul Dean), Dan (Derek Tsang), Pinky (Cherman
Poonyasak), Ken (Pubate Maganit) & YY (Tiffany Lee) with her ... but
she needn't have bothered, as the youngsters prove totally useless,
instead of helping her look for her brother, they seem preoccupied to get
the merry-go-round going, & even after one of them, Ka-ho, has
disappeared (he was killed by some spirits), most of them still try to
fiogure out their relationshipß problems. Of course, eventually the
spirits that live on the amusement park premises (it once was a graveyard)
hit big time, & one by one the youngsters are killed ... but not even
that stops Shan from making a pass on Pinky, who seems to give in to his
advances ... until she proves to be a demon (rather inexplicably) &
strangles him. Eventually, only Yen is left alive, since she has brought
her DV-cam & has learned from her mother (Kara Hui), a psychic, how to
detect spirits with it. But once on her own, she must realize she is no
match for the parks demon ... thank god her mother stops by, with another
camera that can indeed capture spirits & send them to heaven.. Mother
doesn't survive it though, but Yen can fianlly rid the park from its evil
demon with mom's camera. Then in a way too long finale Yen uses her
camera to send the spirits of the deceased that have been captured in the
park to heaven, including all her friends ... well, all her friends but
Shan, who has survived being strangled by Pinky (don't ask) ... By
and large, director Andrew Lau can be considered as a competent,
imaginative director of genre movies, handling genres as diverse as the
crime genre (e.g the Infernal
Affairs series, the Young and Dangerous-series)
& the martial arts genre (e.g. The Duel, Storm Riders)
with equal aplomb. This stab at the horror-genre however can only be
described as an atrocity (& I don't mean that in a good way): Amidst
all the fancy but boring special effects (which include some unnecessary
3D-scenes) no attempt at creating an atmosphere is made, the story is both
overused & boring, & its sloppily told, & the characters are
so annoying you just wish they would die sooner. & the sappy ending
where Yen sends everyone to heaven, doesn't help one bit either, of
course.
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