The Tag - Along

Tag-Along is the first movie of a trilogy that is based on an urban legend. A little girl with a red dress haunt down people with regrets, by "kidnapping" them: basically she take over their mind and she make them go to a forest, where they'll be trapped. It is a pretty basic plot, pretty standard for a ghost story.

The movie has nice premises, compared to the average occidental horror movie has less jumps scares. The real problem with the movie is the CGI, extremely bad. Ghosts that appears are clearly fake, and instead being scary, they are actually funny to watch.

Actors were kinda okay, maybe Wei-Ning Hsu that portrayed the girlfriend of the main character, was a little bit better, but no one really stand out. Usually horror from Asia are better, but in this case I was very disappointed.

Attempting to move on his life, an ambitious real-estate agent and his girlfriend find their relationship struggles interrupted by the disappearance of his grandmother, but once he goes missing as well she finds a potential cause to be the legend of a local ghost coming after them.

This ends up being quite a decent if flawed effort. One of the brightest aspects here is the rather intriguing storyline that utilizes a wholly effective rationale for the ghost haunting. Tackling a popular and chilling local legend that's built into the local folklore and tells a rather interesting concept for a ghost film. A mischievous being that preys on guilt and regret, especially with children and the elderly, there's potentially a lot to really get into with the concept of a ghost following a person around to torment them for their feelings of guilt in their lives. This is particularly evident in the fact that the central relationships present in the film that borders on their regrets in life, from failing to keep childhood promises to their lack of understanding the romantic feelings that pop up in their romantic side. Once this early setup is accomplished, the later series of jump scares and ghostly interactions becomes all the more intriguing. Directly aping the original legend with the video footage of the girl in the red dress following a group of unknowing hikers in the mountains, these scenes come off nicely mixing together some rather traditional elements with the folklore trappings. These early scenes of the ghost influencing their dreams as they both end up getting their own dream-like encounter with the ghost popping up out of nowhere to generate scares or the stand-out hallucination of him supposedly eating bugs and worms instead of a regular meal. These are accomplished in conjunction with the creepy-looking ghost itself that looks quite chilling and really helps to sell some of the scares in the scares, especially evident in the scares of it crawling around on the floor chasing after them. There are later scenes in the jungle searching for everyone that manages to generate some reasonable suspense with the frantic search based on the earlier knowledge of their interactions with the ghost and the creepy setting is put to good use as well with these frantic scenes. Overall, these are what really hold this one up. There are some problems with this one. The main issue here is the overly familiar feeling that runs throughout the film, mostly centered on the overloaded sense of stylistic choices taken from other films. With the film focused on thinking these elements drive the main fearful aspects instead of its generally captivating storyline, there's a somewhat bland feeling that can emerge at times. As well, the other big issue here is the rather weak story that tends to be more confusing than anything. This one offers up a wholly intriguing storyline about a young ghost girl that can foreshadow strange incidents and calamities afterward, yet really doesn't do much with it. In the end, this relies more on an intriguing premise more than actually having anything with this ghost and just causes some confusion as for why include that backstory in the first place. These are what hold it down the most.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence and Language.

I really think the movie is really interesting on how its told the story. The story is unique with a urban legend that I never heard of and is interesting on the details of it. Like how there's a Little Girl in a red dress who cause people to disappeared into the woods and cause them to experience illusions. The movie is build up really well throughout and the atmosphere is pretty effective with its mood throughout. I found a couple of illusions to be pretty freaky on how its done and feels like a psychological horror movie. And I like the climax of the movie.

I found the creepiness factor to be weak since the jump scares aren't that effective and some of the illusions doesn't look creepy.

'The Tag-Along' takes a well-known urban legend in Taiwan and turns it into a bone-chilling mystery built around themes of loss, regret and familial love. Depending on your knowledge of Taiwanese folklore, you may or may not have heard of the 'little girl in red', who was infamously captured by a group of climbers on home video making their way along a mountain trail. That video was broadcast on television way back in 1988, and since then, others have reported similar sightings of a little girl in a red dress just before they had met with some form of calamity. Legend has it that the girl is a mountain demon known as 'mo-sien' (or 魔神仔 in Chinese), which preys on fear and guilt and is particularly drawn to children and the elderly.

So it is that the first to disappear in the film is an elderly woman who happens to be good friends with our lead male protagonist's grandma (Liu Yin–shang), a curmudgeonly lady confronted with the same fate one typical morning after making breakfast for her grandson Wei (River Huang). It will be a couple of days before Wei realises that she has gone missing – despite being his caretaker from young, Wei's busy work schedule as a real estate agent have kept the two apart in recent times, leaving his grandmother in constant lament about how little he sleeps every night and how little time he spends at home with her. Their estrangement is also in part due to Wei's relationship with his girlfriend Yi-chun (Hsu Wei Ning), who harbours no plans to get married, settle down or have kids even after five years, much to Wei's grandmother's dismay.

As you can expect, there is a lesson here on taking the ones who love us for granted – and as we learn through a series of flashbacks, Wei had made a promise to his grandmother when he was a kid that he would have dinner with her every night, even scribbling it on the underside of their dinner table. But it isn't just Wei who has a lesson to be learnt; midway through the film, Wei's grandmother is found walking lost and disoriented along a stretch of highway, right after Wei himself vanishes. Just as Wei had been taking his grandmother for granted, so has Yi-chun been doing likewise of Wei, and the second half of the film is as much about Yi-chun digging deeper into the legend of the 'mo-sien' as it is about her learning the depths of Wei's love for her.

If there is one thing that Jian Shi-geng's screenplay gets right, it is in establishing the relationships between Wei and his grandmother as well as between Wei and Yi-chun with careful attention and detail. Not only do we feel for Wei mourning the loss of his grandmother, we empathise with Yi-chun coping with the sudden departure of Wei, and within these two relationships, Jian makes keenly felt the regret we often face when the people who love us but whom we take for granted are abruptly taken away from us. The latter allows the climax set deep in a patch of dense forest to be both scary yet heartfelt, as Yi-chun resolves to save Wei from the clutches of the mountain demon that assumes the form of the 'little red girl'.

On his part, Cheng Wei-hao, who makes his feature filmmaking debut here, largely succeeds in sustaining a tense and uneasy atmosphere throughout the film. There are a couple of nicely earned 'jump' scares here, but what lingers is the sense of dread that he builds with the creaking of a door, the rustle of the wind and the voice of a little girl. Cheng loves to play with his audience's sense of focus, and an oft-used but nonetheless effective technique is how he teases us with something that we should be seeing on the periphery of the frame just before it jumps in our face. Just as well, Cheng hits the emotional beats of Jian's script nicely – in particular, an early sequence that shows Wei's grandmother trying to wake Wei up for work when his alarm rings and then preparing his breakfast and lunch box for him pays off subsequently in unexpectedly emotional ways.

No wonder then that 'The Tag-Along' has gone on to become the most successful horror movie in Taiwan in a decade – like the best of its genre, it isn't just a scattershot collection of scares but rather a poignant lesson on human nature that tugs on your heartstrings as much as it rattles your nerves. To be fair, it does owe its audience a couple of loose ends, and the CGI-heavy climax does border on overkill, but on the whole, Cheng's maiden entry to the horror genre is a spooky atmospheric affair that bears a foreboding omnipresence. At no point do you ever feel that its thrills are cheap or convenient, nor does it lose its emotional hook along the way, so if you're looking for a good scare, you'll find yourself in good company if you follow the little girl in red.

I don't watch a lot of Asian horror films, mainly because I have never really been much of a fan of paranormal movies, and for the most part Asian horror films tend to focus on paranormal type things (mostly scary little kid ghosts). But the other night I was bored and in the mood for a horror film, I decided to not be picky at all and basically just randomly pick one of the newer releases from the genre. I stumbled onto a Taiwanese film called "The Tag Along" and honestly I am glad I did.

The film follows Zhi-wei He, a young adult who lives a fairly busy life trying to juggle his job, his girlfriend, and spending time with his grandmother who lives with him. Zhi-wei He's life is turned upside down when a little ghost girl in a red dress shows up and takes his grandmother away. From there things get pretty wild as the little ghost girl makes multiple appearances to terrorize Zhi-wei and the other people in his life.

Early on "The Tag Along" does a lot of things right, the characters are interesting and the story is set up well, plus there are a lot of very well done subtle scare scenes that did a good job of catching me off guard. Unfortunately as the film progresses it becomes more and more dependent on CGI and less on practical scares. At this point it was still entertaining, however the CGI caused the film to lose a lot of it's creepiness. There are actually quite a few scenes that had me giggling a bit due to the goofy effects.

I liked "The Tag Along", overall it was a pretty fun ghost story that was clever at times and didn't rely too much on the normal Ghost Movie clichés (even though there are quite a few present here). Without the CGI I feel like this could have been a lot better, but even with it the film is still entertaining and worth checking out.

6/10