Ghost Sweepers (2012): Director Sin Jeong-won manages the seemingly impossible and – after Chaw – directs another horror comedy I actually enjoyed watching. Reasons for this enjoyment the film contains enough. A fine and very funny cast, a script that actually knows how to place jokes during dramatic sequences as well as how important sentiment is when you’re making a non-cruel comedy, and Sin’s excellent pacing all come together to form a film easily likeable and fun.
Nate and Hayes (1983): One of the reasons why attempts during the 80s to revive the adventure movie genre in its swashbuckling guise never took off were godawful productions like this, an adventure movie without any sense for adventure, directed by a man (Ferdinand Fairfax) with not much of an idea of how to stage an adventure movie, a script that drags and drags and drags and never stops laughing about its own unfunny jokes, and with about as much of a sense of romance as Police-Bot-3546/15a.
Because that’s not bad enough, the film also manages the seemingly impossible and gets a bad performance out of Tommy Lee Jones. Well, and out of everybody else on screen, too, which suggests it’s fair to blame the director more than the actors for that one, too. The only positive thing I can report is that the film does put some effort in giving its female lead – as played by Jenny Seagrove, last seen here having relations with a tree – actual agency even though the whole plot (once it actually starts after half an hour or so of dithering) is based on her kidnapping. Alas, the rest of the film is much too unenjoyable for it to pay off.
Into the Mirror (2003): Kim Seong-ho’s film is far from being a favourite among South Korean films from the height of the last Asian horror boom, even though it is often very stylishly shot and generally atmospheric. The film suffers from a script that never manages to really use its supernatural menace for all that it’s worth, nor manages to connect the psychological plight of its main character with the undercurrents of said menace. Instead, it feels like a horror movie grafted onto a movie about an ex-cop melodramatically suffering from the repercussions of a very bad shooting, where one half of the film and the other don’t actually seem to interact with each other all that much.
I can’t say I’m too keen about all the suffering ex-cop stuff at all: I’ve been there, done that, and seen it done much better than here more than once.
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