Dip sin dip sin

I stumbled upon the 2015 Cantonese horror movie "Are You Here" (aka "Dip sin dip sin") in 2019. Needless to say, that with my love for the Hong Kong cinema I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch this movie. And the fact that it was a horror movie, made it all the more appealing.

However, "Are You Here" turned out to be a bland and less than mediocre movie actually. Why? Well, first of all the story was way too mainlined and uneventful actually. It felt like director Jill Wong was running on autopilot, because there was very little of anything scary or truly outstanding to be experienced throughout the course of the movie. Or perhaps it was because of a subpar story written by Patrick Kong.

It was nice, however, to see a movie with nothing but almost entirely unfamiliar faces in the cast ensemble. There were two familiar faces here, those belong to veteran actresses Lan Law and Susan Yam-Yam Shaw. I will say that the acting in the movie was actually fair, but it was severely hindered by the script and storyline.

"Are You Here" was just way too generic and it was frightfully devoid of anything even remotely scary. So that was definitely working against the overall enjoyment of the movie.

Desperate for cash, largely due to his gambling addiction, a young man named "Lung" (Sammy Sum) has no choice but to inform his three coworkers that the computer business they started together must close down. Unsurprisingly, this angers two of his colleagues, "Keong" (Alan Chun-Kwong Luk) and "Fun" (Jumbo Tsang), who clearly anticipated this news and had little respect for Lung anyway. Likewise, his girlfriend and fourth business partner, "Mun" (Jacqueline Ch'ng), is also disappointed with him, especially since she just received news that she is pregnant with his child. However, as fate would have it, just as they are about to leave their business office for the last time, an old lady named "Mrs. Wong" (Hee Ching Paw) arrives with a request that they transfer a video program centered around a Ouija board onto a telephone application--and she offers enough money for all of them to stay in business. Being rather selfish, Lung, Keong, and Fun readily agree, while Mun, on the other hand, advises against it due to her fears that something isn't quite right. Yet it isn't until they accept Mrs. Wong's offer that they realize they should have listened to Mun. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that, even though it is listed as the fourth installment of the "Ouija" series, this particular film doesn't have any relationship to its predecessors. At least, I couldn't see any relationship. I also didn't care for Sammy Sum's acting, as he seemed a bit too demonstrative in some of these scenes. Be that as it may, while I certainly don't consider this to be a bad film necessarily, I wasn't too impressed with it either, and I have rated it accordingly.

Hong Kong movie that's missing a lot of beats for the western audiences since it has cultural influence that is vastly different from our own and, therefore, don't hold the same weight. To underscore this, the North American distribution company renamed it Ouija 4, hence it having nothing to do with the first two.

That being said, it wasn't horrible, would I watch it again? No. Would I recommend it seriously? Also no. But you could do worse for a lazy afternoon viewing.

The version I watched was dubbed, really badly dubbed, and the plot was total nonsense with a LOT of holes here and there. It's barely cohesive, like being crammed inside a jar and shaken wildly before being haphazardly dumped into the blinding sun.

There's obviously bits that are lost in translation, and as mentioned before, a lot of the story impacts aren't as meaningful because of the cultural divide.

Not for anyone serious, just turn your brain off and have a good giggle at the oddities.