Afterimages

Maximum Extreme was invited to the gala premiere of Afterimages, a Singapore made horror flick featuring 5 short stories based on various local folktales and superstitions. Five of our lucky readers were also able to attend the premiere thanks to our awesome ticket giveaway.

The premise is that a bunch of friends burn paper effigies as offerings to the dead during the local Hungry Ghost festival. You can send the deceased pretty much anything by burning a paper version of the item, iPhone, house, TV, car.

The friends burn a paper camera but in a strange twist of fate, they get something back from the other side.

Each day after the students burn their offerings, they find a movie reel in the ashes. Invariably these curious cats decide to go ahead and watch whatever is on these movie reels. What they discover is 5 spooky tales that intertwine with their own fate.

Do they make it out alive or does curiosity kill these cats?? You'll have to watch to find out. This of course leads to the burning question, is this movie worth your money and time?

Well, it's a decent effort. The tales are pretty creepy and the movie plods along at a good pace leaving little time to get bored.

I quite liked the premise behind the various tales but while they may be creepy, they never actually become scary.

What I didn't like about the movie was the sub-standard special effects and more importantly, the poor acting that was frequently on display. To be honest, some of the acting really is terrible which makes me wonder how those actors ever got past the audition stages??

These poor performances really push the movie into comedy territory at times.

The best performance comes from veteran actor Vincent Tee whose chicken rice tale is probably one of the better short stories on offer. We were fortunate to have had the chance to chat with Vincent after the screening and he's clearly a really decent bloke.

Bottom line is that this movie will pass a couple of hours, you will be entertained, but it's ultimately very forgettable and if you're looking for a pre-Halloween scare then this is definitely not gonna do the job.

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Some people gave this low marks... I can't see why. The posh English accents are common in Asia, they are well spoken. Accept that and you'll enjoy the movie. One said the acting was bad, only the first "clip" as it was supposed to be a short film by students! I guess they didn't see the rest of the film and the professionally made "clips" that followed. It's enjoyable, average, but for young people who've not seen many horror movies they will like it.

The film wasn't great, but it wasn't awful either. It's a collection of ghost stories with some, low budget, filler to link them together, I'm not really sure what other people were expecting from an anthology from an unheard-of production company, but this fulfills the brief.

I actually rather enjoyed the film, the idea of making offerings to the dead and the dead making their own offerings in return, was quite novel. And the stories the dead sent were pretty good.

I really like Asian mythology, so the short stories were exactly my kind of thing, but the stories rarely have a moral or a nice neat ending, which I know annoys a lot of westerners. If you don't like that type of story, don't watch the film. Even the characters question the lack of point or moral to the tales.

If you like Geodam or Junji Ito Maniac, then you'll probably appreciate this film, but if you don't like the "s**t happens" approach to story telling, this will be frustrating. There's no explanation for most of the things that happen in the stories and most of them are completely open to interpretation. Which is what I find interesting about them.

Great Asian horror film. Asian horror stories are much less graphic than American. But in my opinion just as good or in some cases better. They concentrate more on stories than special effects. If you can enjoy the story driven films, I believe you will enjoy this one.

I'm pretty tolerant of lower budget films, but this was awful to watch. Embarrassing. Visually it's tolerable, but it is abysmal on every other aspect. It reeks of student film project. There is an endless list of things you could rant about, but it just isn't worth it. Walk around this landmine and move on.