The Death Curse
Reviewed by YTSL
Back in the year 2000, Soi Cheang (AKA Cheang
Pou-Soi) made his directorial debut with “Diamond Hill” -- a film with
family ties as its central, binding, theme and a creepy feel for much of
it before being revealed to be more of a drama than conventionally scary
effort. Three years and two attempts at horror (i.e., “Horror Hotline:
Bighead Monster” and “New Blood”) on, he looks to have returned to exploring
a topic that appears close to his heart. Additionally, while that
which has earned some notoriety on account of it being the debut movie
of Kenny Kwan and Steven Cheung -- i.e., the two “Boyz” who are supposed
to be the male equivalent of the Twins -- as well as starring Charlene
Choi and Gillian Chung may look like it promises to dispense many horror
type thrills, my sense post viewing this 2003 Hong Kong-Mainland China
co-production is that its makers actually sought to provide its audience
with more touchy feely moments than spine-tingling chills or outright frights.
THE DEATH CURSE effectively begins with the attempts
of a father to reunite with his eight children by six different wives.
When he made his first appearance in the story, Ting Ching Wai was already
an old man, and one who was not in particularly robust health to boot.
So it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to find that, by the time any
of his offspring -- a varied lot who include two whose first language was
Mandarin, two others who now made their home in Thailand, a Triad tough
and a naive youth who had been living in an orphanage -- answered his plea
to go to his sizeable and forbidding as well as traditional looking place
of residence and visit, the medical scholar already had passed away.
Consequently, although the all pretty much grown up Ting children had journeyed
-- some from quite far away -- to meet with their father, he was not among
the living individuals who were there to greet them when they finally made
it to a place that doesn’t look to have been all that easy to reach, and
also is not one that many people wish to visit.
Instead, upon their arrival, they (who come in
the form of Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Raymond Wong and the two Boyz
along with two older Mainland thespians) were introduced to an elderly
retainer turned caretaker (who can seem suspiciously well versed with regards
to the “do”s and “don’t”s of death rituals), a lawyer (Alex Fong’s bespectacled
character took great pains to identify himself using the English title
of “lawyer” -- rather than, say, the Cantonese word “lok si” -- and as
having the surname of Cheung rather than Ding) and those of their half-siblings
who had made it to the mansion before them. Then, after all seven
of the Ting children who Lawyer Cheung said had managed to be contacted
had passed through the doors of their late father’s residence, they were
taken to a darkened room to behold, with some understandable sense of shock,
their father’s corpse sitting -- rather than lying -- in state.
Somewhere along the line, Nick (Raymond Wong),
Linda (Gillian Chung), Nancy (Charlene Choi), Ben (Kenny Kwan) and Jerry
(Steven Cheung) and the two eldest Ting offspring also were told by Lawyer
Cheung that each of them stood to inherit a fortune; one that, to be sure,
would be divided among the sextet but, nonetheless, constitute a very substantial
sum for each of the recipients. However, and but of course(!), certain
conditions needed to be met in order for this to occur. One of them
involved their having to remain within the mansion and its grounds for
forty-nine days and nights. A second was that they have to individually
light and burn incense to pay their respects to their departed father at
midnight of every night that they stay at his (former) abode. A third
of these was that, upon completion of the aforementioned ritual, they --
who, it should be emphasized, weren’t all that likely to harbor genuinely
warm feelings towards their half-siblings whose existence they had previously
not known -- had to then give one another a hug!
For the most part, these requirements initially
appeared to be easy enough to fulfill even while maybe also being a bit
of a drag. However, starting in earnest on the seventh night after
Mr. Ting’s death, a time period traditionally thought by the Chinese to
be when the soul of the departed would return to visit its former earthly
residence, things began to feel and go amiss. As a result,
some people appeared to have good reason to believe that a DEATH CURSE
had befallen the elderly Ting and also would rain down on his offspring;
and this especially so after one of the Ting children soon ends up as dead
as his father and at least one other of them starts behaving in a way that
makes one inclined to believe that she has become possessed.
If truth be told, however, at no point during
my viewing of THE DEATH CURSE did I feel frightened or even become all
that anxiety-ridden. Instead, like I sought to suggest previously,
Soi Cheang seems to have sought for the film -- which also has a “love
interest” role for Lawrence Chou -- to be more (biological) relationship
affirming than anything else; and this even while it actually also possesses
the trappings of a crime drama (more so, in fact, than horror effort) for
much of it. As such, that whose high point may well be the genuinely
interesting plus atmospheric physical structure in which much of the movie
takes place is not a work I can recommend to people seriously looking for
scares. On the other hand, should you be the kind of person who would
enjoy checking out a scene which had the Twins winding up in bed together
(though not necessarily in order to have sex) or a few more that saw this
pair of stuffed toy like personalities being bound up and put in a few
tight spots, then this is one offering that can provide some thrills.
My rating for the film: 5.5
Pictures were obtained at this very cheerful
site.
