Re-cycle

What's the worst in Re-Cycle is an absence of story. Purposeless journey, groundless twists, meaningless dialogs, loose ends all way round. To avoid misunderstanding, the script isn't simple or stupid, it nearly doesn't exist.

The only thing, which shines are creative, scary, stylish, surprising visuals/sets. Those sets with recycled books, rotten town, waiting deads almost took my breath away from either visual or creative points of view. Worth mentioning, last time it happened to me with Silent Hill. Extra marks.

Special effects and scares are not novel for those, who have seen previous Pang brothers features, but they are mixed in quite a fresh way. Across the movie one may also experience feelings resembling The Cell, Silent Hill, and even Matrix.

Avoid if looking for traditional horror movie, but watch rather to widen your imagination and to have several strong scares. Provision yourself with patience to neglect the absence of the story.

Re-Cycle is something completely different than you would expect if you are familiar with the Pang brothers. It starts off as a horror movie, but than continues as a fantastic and inspired fantasy film. The movie has a deep and disturbing message, which really took me by surprise. The music and sound effects are amazing and pull you even further in the story. The story has a less is more approach which really suits the message. The computer animated pieces aren't always as stunning as you would hope, but they do the trick. This movie is really worth it to be seen. With this movie the Pang brothers have proved to be not only masters of horror, but also masters of fantasy.

All writers ruthlessly re-cycle ideas, characters, memories and experiences. The creative mind is littered with discarded snippets of people and places all waiting to be remembered and put to use. In Re-cycle, Ting-Yin is a successful writer who turned a failed romance into three bestsellers. She is now working on a supernatural novel and strange things are happening in her house. Is this her inspiration, or is her story coming to life? The film's beginning is classically horror, but when Ting-Yin stumbles out of reality it becomes much more fantastic and really feels like a video game. She moves from one bizarre landscape to another, dealing with zombies as she goes.

Beautifully shot, the production is slick, but the story is more melodramatic than frightening.

This movie has a writer who has some trouble in her life at the particular moment the movie starts. An old love has resurfaced and she is having difficulty with her next novel. She is seemingly being haunted by a figure she wrote about, but then tossed away then she is somehow pulled into another realm. The movie does start off a bit slowly as there is a bit of set up with a few scares here and there like the typical Asian horror movie. Then when she gets to the other realm the movie is suddenly totally cool as it is so like watching a Silent Hill movie instead. I mean these strange ghosts start chasing our heroine and they move just like the ghosts in Silent Hill 4, she encounters a cliff like in any of the Silent Hill games and she enters an area that looks like the industrialized zone in part 4. Then she runs into an old man and the movie slams on the breaks and you get a few more great visual scenes, but the movie never has the energy it did when the heroine first enters this strange realm. There are still a couple of good visuals such as the mysterious creepy hanging people and the bridge and well. However, there are a few to many scenes that seem to need a push as it takes a while for them to get going and there are a lot of talking scenes and the final confrontation is very anti climatic. Then the ending comes and they throw a twist on top of the rather predictable twist and movie over. All I could think is what could have been if we had more scenes like that where she first arrived rather than say the scene with the flowers and neglected dead people which had no energy and rather light music. This movie also seems to want to be original, but it does not even come close. Other than Silent Hill there is also bits of The Neverending Story, Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away, and a host of other movies. I guess the makers of this film wanted to recycle a lot of other ideas where they might have been better off using just one or two.

The Pang Brothers book marked a creatively grim, if disconnected little supernatural horror film balancing that of a novelist (a perfectly pitched performance by Angelica Lee) trying to write a horror novel, but finding out what she writes is personally happening to her. Being haunted by her work with the growing expectations, or a former if complicated love coming back on the scene. She enters a dream reality (where the title comes in to play), mixing the stark horror and fleeting happiness in what is a journey of discovery… up until its undermining ending. I was actually liking the (traditional, but stimulating) build-up (consisting of eerie sounds, lurking figures and a sense of danger) until she enters this fantasy world (like a nightmarish spin of 'Alice's in Wonderland'), where the story felt more like clips (well that's how memories kept hidden, waiting to be remembered simply come and then go) and being cluttered with crazy CGI… which wasn't badly projected, as some sequences were amazing, but eventually I grew tired of the routine. The Pang Brothers' surefooted handling is slick, letting the flowing cinematography craft out haunting frames and wonderfully strange imagery. Inspired, but emotionally starved and the story really loses momentum.