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Ab-normal Beauty
Hong Kong 2004
Director: Oxide Pang
With Race Wong, Rosanne Wong, Anson Leung, Michelle Yim
Edgy ambassadors of the new wave of creepy Asian horror, the ultra-hip Hong Kong stylistas Danny and Oxide Pang made their mark in the international market with The Eye (2002), which is currently being remade for mainstream Englishspeaking audiences by Ringu director Hideo Nakata. After The Eye, however, Danny directed Leave Me Alone (2004) on his own. Now, Ab-normal Beauty is helmed by Oxide, with the brothers getting just a joint production credit. These are companion films: Danny's outing deals with the ramifications for those involved in a car accident, while the heroine of Oxide's film witnesses that accident, an event which triggers her voyeuristic tendencies.
Ab-normal Beauty seems to have much in common with The Eye: sharp visuals, a dramatic use of intense, sometimes coded colour (Oxide was previously one of Hong Kong cinema's most respected post-production colourists), and horror. The Eye tells the story of a blind woman who starts to see the dead after having a cornea transplant; Ab-normal Beauty tells of a woman obsessed with death seen through the lens of her camera (I couldn't help wondering whether this was a possibly misjudged example of product placement by the ubiquitous Nikon, which seems to be the real star of the show).
Yet for all its good looks, Ab-normal Beauty is a rather derivative exploitation movie, a slick exercise in how to make an exquisite jewel from the common stuff of voyeuristic stalk-and-slash. If The Eye was the demon love child of Blink ana The Hands ofOrlac via...