Watches
July 21, 2012
2003. The Asian suspense wave was raging, Japan and Korea were benefitting like mad, and Hong Kong was pretty pissed they'd (almost) completely missed the boat. Not for lack of trying, but their sense of horror is just too different from the West to make it a successful export product. Andrew Lau's The Park is a perfect example. It clearly tries to appeal to Western tastes, but the execution is too poor to make it work.
Alan has been missing for a week already. The trail leads to an abandoned amusement park that is supposedly haunted after a young girl was murdered there a decade earlier. Alan's mom can mark ghosts with her camera and believes her son is already dead, but his friends decide to check out the park regardless. One by one they go missing.
The setting is perfect for a horror flick, only Lau doesn't really know how to use it. He throws in all kinds of horror clichés, but because there are so many it becomes impossible to build up any tension, let alone deliver real scares. It's still a somewhat okay horror film, as Lau keeps throwing different ideas at you, but for me, it's more proof that Hong Kong somehow has trouble making scary flicks.