The conventionally creepy opening half of this movie manages to draw you in- and then gears shift and you're plopped right into the middle of a fairy tale. Not that there's anything wrong with that... And it's not like we haven't seen it happen before: many martial arts movies, for instance, start off "straight" and suddenly veer (sometimes totally unexpectedly) into supernatural territory. What's unusual here is that a fright film morphs into a fantasy. While some of the fx look not unlike something you'd find in a video game, the cheesier fx are kept to a minimum. This part of the movie takes place in the Ghost Land fantasyscape and the "unreality" of it all can be attributed (if one finds one must make allowances for borderline fx) to that aspect of the story. The Pang brothers handle fantasy as well as they do fright and the mix isn't bad. Checker out.
