ShawnInNJ

Complete utter disaster of a film. Nothing works: 3D effects are terrible and gimmicky, the plot is all over the place (above all, boring), and the adult actors seem to be sleep walking through the entire movie. I wish Takashi had stuck with the children and the far more compelling story. After establishing the basic premise of the story, it gets stuck in a pattern of repeating the same things over and over again with a twist here and there until the finale. There were just too many actors and not enough story to make it feature length film. The "horror" scenes are either unintentionally humorous or just boring. Ironically for a director known to build tension and atmosphere in his movies, the creepiness of the famous haunted hospital is completely lost.

The premise of Tai hong is based on actual headlines from Thailand. However, with the exception of "Flame," the other stories are fairly generic Asian folklore. "Flame" is also the best of the 4 stories with excellent production quality and a twisty plot. The story that followed, "Imprison" is the least developed, almost like an afterthought. It is exactly what you would expect and it played out as predictably. "Revenge" is the familiar body in the water tank story. The demonic red-eyes SFX is extremely distracting and certainly below par compared to the "Flame." There are some gross-out moments, but everything else was the same story you read/heard/was told about. Haunting Motel" is set with a gay man-straight friend and a prostitute. It didn't really fit with the first 3 stories, but it was somewhat funny with a humorous take on the Grudge crawling female ghost. However, it was too over the top slapstick and felt misplaced.

Overall it is not that bad but it felt like the film really wanted to do one movie but ended up with 3 others.

This movie had several interesting elements: Asian horror style ghosts, twin sisters and flashes of their brutal childhood, and the primary story of a girl searching for her missing twin. At the same time it deals with guilt, fear and revenge. this film just never managed to pull everything together.

While it isn't a terrible film, it felt like it wasted so much of its originality and concept due to the lack of execution. There's a lot of influences from Asian horror movies in this film but not blatant or distracting.

That's the first half of the movie. The second half of the movie takes an turn away from the supernatural origins to a ridiculous revenge plot. While I understand the director intentionally left some parts of the story unresolved, it arrived at such unexpected conclusion via a nonsensical path.

Overall it isn't a bad film. It had a lot of interesting spots, but it took too long to fully develop, and when it finally got going, the story turns and becomes rather pointless.