Desejos Mortais

The Pang Brothers know their stuff when it comes to visual style. This movie is a proof. It's visually flawless. Beautiful photography, nice camera tricks, gorgeous looking leads and eerie atmospheres, but that's as far as it goes. Oh… And the sound is nicely done too. In some ways this film is like The Crow: City of Angels, an absolute feast for the eye, but it delivers no content to back it up. And it gets boring in some parts, since you don't really give too much about the characters. The so-called violent scenes at the end are a letdown –that's if you're looking for something truly disturbing. It's well done, and creepy in some parts. The killer's method was a great idea, with all the cameras and the sound of him approaching. I loved that. But at the end it's like if someone mixed Beverly Hills 90210 with Thesis (the Spanish flick). If that's your cup of tea, then this movie is for you.

Watch it on a nice home system. You will get it's full blow.

the photography and the use of the music was very nice. i enjoyed the majority of the first half, and was expecting the movie to end when the second segment of the plot unfolded. i think the transgression was a bit awkward, and a certain person at the end of the film wasn't entirely flesh out. this is not the same kind of movie as The Eye, and if you are not interested in the earlier portion of the movie, fast.forward toward the end for all the gritty material. its nice to see, that even with the movie's flaws, it stands out from the influx of carbon-copy split-personality/long haired ghosts/technological entities gone evil. the violence isn't too harsh (although there is some animal-oriented slaughter, which i assume is simulated to maintain American film standards) and most people shouldn't get too overwhelmed to handle a viewing: my rating: seven out of ten stars.

Jiney is a young photographer,but she is not satisfied with her work.One day,she witnesses a car crash which stimulates her to take some pictures of its dying victims.The girl starts obsessively making photos of dead and dying people and animals.This morbid fascination with death become her ghastly obsession.These images of death and destruction turns on Jiney and when she is finally able to shoot a suicide,she finds complete sexual relief and totally losses herself.However,knowing that her sexual desires are not right,Jiney wants to stop this before it gets out of control.Together with her intimate friend Jas,Jiney starts to acknowledge her wrong behaviour.Suddenly she receives a snuff video from a killer who is sharing the same artistic idea about death as Jiney."Ab-normal Beauty" is a pretty unsettling thriller made by Pang brothers.It's a fascinating look into a young woman's obsession with death.The film is loaded with truly ominous and dark atmosphere and there are some lashings of gore that may shock casual viewers.The S&M style killer looks creepy but his identity is rather easy to guess.The film is colorful and stylish as it resembles a truly moody painting.Give it a look.9 out of 10.

"Jiney" (Race Wong) is an art student who specializes in both painting and photography. One day she happens to hear a car accident not too far from where she is standing and rushes out to take a photograph of the dead man. After exposing the film she begins to have hallucinations which she then incorporates in her artwork. Soon she becomes fixated with blood and death and incorporates these two elements in all of her pictures. And the further she goes the more it scares her girlfriend "Jasmine" (Rosanne Wong)and her new friend "Anson" (Anson Leung). To further complicate the situation, Jiney has a childhood issue she still hasn't quite recovered from and somebody close to her has even worse psychological problems. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this movie had an interesting plot but the director (Oxide Chun Pang) was much too deliberate in his technique which caused the film to drag on much too long in some cases. Be that as it may, I thought that the presence of both Race Wong and Rosanne Wong definitely enhanced the scenery which certainly helped to some degree. In short, it wasn't a great movie by any means but it wasn't that bad either. Average.

Films about art and artists are of great interest to me, delvings into the relationship of image and imaginer, into the imagining itself and what change it wreaks on the two parties. Abnormal Beauty is then a film of interest to me and though it has little new or especially intelligent to say, it speaks with elegance and it speaks from the heart. Its central artist is the troubled Jin (Race Wong) who comes across a car crash and feels compelled to photograph it, in doing so reopening cracks of childhood trauma, widening them to deathly obsession, morbid sensuality and danger. Much of the film is dark psychological drama rather than horror, the whole visual scheme mirroring Jin's descent. Shots are still, sparsely composed and sometimes richly tinted, an imagery of bleak yearning, of the cameras power to make beauty from from death, to bring something from nothing and yet in the freezing of image eternally condemn, forever sequester from reality. All this perhaps the highlight of the film, its thoughts internalised speaking with so much more eloquence than the occasional fragments of exposition. Its powerfully acted stuff too, Race Wong subtly moving, quietly pained, she does well in suggesting character shadows. Her real life sister Rosanne plays (in a slightly perverse bit of casting), her girlfriend Jas, though the lesbian currents are pretty restrained. Another fine turn, possessive and emotionally fraught, the extrovert half of the two. Anson Leung is good too as a classmate of Jin innocently drawn to her. All cylinders fire pretty well it must be said, things reaching an emotional climax around two thirds of the way through as Jin heads towards her precipice. Then the film switches gears to head for real horror in its climax, a move that works thematically but not so much dramatically. Quite simply it's a lop sided film, what should be a thought out second half becomes a climax instead and ends up feeling more of an undernourished epilogue than the savage gut punch it aims for. In more general terms the film suffers from being somewhat restrained as well, some will no doubt praise its subtlety but the story is a bit too lurid for restraint to really work. There's too little actual threat, the menace being predictably largely of the mind, and too little pointed exploration, for a film too restrained to go mad it doesn't help itself by being intellectually undercooked. In a film so concerned with dark aesthetics and the break from normality there's comically little treatment of the related moral issues and the general psychological fall out follows standard plotting lines rather than great insight. Still, this is a pretty fine film despite its ills. Its a film to submit to and swim around in, to abandon oneself to the leads and drink in their sights, sorrow to their sorrows. Truth be told it was only after viewing that the films flaws started to fall into place, its such a well oiled beast (and more to the point, looks so goddarned pretty) that I was almost captivated for most of the run time. As such I recommend it if you like your Asian horror slow and artful, some I'm sure may like it more than me. But it certainly isn't the latter day underrated classic some have hailed it as. 7/10