"Next Door" (Hong Kong)
Jane returns home to her boyfriend only to discover that he has an affair with a girl named Hosie from the Mainland. When he goes back to his old girlfriend, jealousy arise and the girl wants to see both of them dead.
"Dark Hole" (Japan)
A girl keeps having ghostly visions and one day she visits a therapist in order to get some much needed help. When under hypnosis, she remember that she had an imaginary creature when she was a kid and that the creature protected her from all that was evil and killed those who crossed her path. And now it seems that the creature is back.
"The Lost Memory" (Thailand)
A mother just recently lost some of her memory due to a car crash that she was in. She can't seem to tell what's real and what's not anymore, and things just keep getting worse.
Black Night is a collection of three short films from Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong, similar to Three Extremes or Three for that matter, just not as good though. I must say that I'm a big fan of this concept, that is three shorter films in one, basically for the reason that if one sucks, you always have the next one. It starts off with the Hong Kong piece which is called Next Door and is a story about relationships, affairs, ghosts, water and death. I'm actually quite glad that they choose this one to be first out, since this was the one that had the most to offer. If they it would've started out with the Japanese flick, I'm not sure I would've sat through the whole thing. Anyway, except for being the best of the three, Next Door is also the film that looks most sharp, and that actually helped a little, visually that is. The cinematography was excellent and it just looked very slick.
Next Door is about a love triangle between a guy, his old girlfriend who returns to him and the new girl that he has been having an affair with. Not only that but there's also a little boy in the movie who serves no real purpose and looks like he came straight of the set from Ju-on and just walked into the set for Next Door. I mean, if they have to rip something off, then try to do it properly because this just brought too much unoriginality into an otherwise decent flick. So let's ignore the little boy and move on.
 
To look really good is of course not everything, and while Next Door might look terrific, it just doesn't quite do it on the horror front. The fact is that it offers tons of scares, but unfortunately most of them do not work as good as one had hoped for. The story is far from great but I guess it does the job, its main problem is that there are too many non-effective scares. It's actually too bad since it had some scenes that could've been done better, horror-wise, but instead we just get to sit through scare after scare with the next one being more lame than the previous one. In the end, I think Next Door is watchable even though it didn't quite do it for me.
The second movie is called Dark Hole and comes from Japan. Do you remember really long ago when DVD didn't exist and you sat and watched VHS tapes with films on that had been copied ten times before you got your hand on it? Well, even if you don't, this is just what Dark Hole looks like. It felt like watching an old VHS tape that were about to break any minute and that's not my idea of a good movie experience. Ok, so looks aren't everything, just talked about that above, but if it doesn't look all right, then it of course has to have something else going for it to work and the fact is that it doesn't. I don't wanna say that the story is that bad, it's just the way it was executed I guess that made it turn into a horrible piece of cinema. This girl keeps seeing ghost, and later it turns out that she had an imaginary creature when she was little that she totally had forgotten about. This creature being something evil, and it seems like it's back again for more. It might sound interesting but belive you me, it's not. Again, it was really hard to be affected by the scares, and even though the story wasn't such a bad idea to begin with, making this movie sure was.
Last but not least we get to see a movie called The Lost Memory straight outta Thailand, directed by the same man who gave us Bang Rajan, which wasn't too bad. Unfortunately I can't say the same thing about The Lost Memory which somehow reminded me of Art of the Devil which was also a disasterpiece. Just like the first HK flick, this one looks pretty good too, but just like with Art of the Devil, it gradually turns into a mess the further it kept going. I must say that it caught my interest for the first 15 minutes, but after that things started to go down-hill and the last ten minutes or so were pretty terrible. Again, it deals with a little boy trying to scare the viewer, but fails miserably at doing so. With me mentioning that it deals with a boy, don't think Ju-on or that it ripped that movie off, because this was actually quite different. What I liked about the film was that early on the movie delivered some mystery and not just straight forward horror, and I wish things could've stayed that way, but shortly after it switched over and started delivering one dumb horror scene after another. It's just to bad, and not only that, it was confusing as well. If a movie is good but somewhat confusing, you of course try your best to clear things up, but when it's pretty bad to startwith AND confusing, you're kinda bound to loose focus.
Black Night delivered three movies and while it's sad to say, none of them were good. The first one from HK called Next Door was by far the best, but that doesn't really count for much considering what it's compared to. On the Asian horror front, Black Night has absolutely nothing new to offer which is a shame.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Hak yae
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Takahiko Akiyama, Tanit Jitnukul, Patrick Leung
WRITING CREDITS: Takahiko Akiyama, Tanit Jitnukul, Patrick Leung
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Nutsha Bootsri, Takashi Kashiwabara, Annie Liu
COUNTRY: Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand
RUNTIME: 98 min
RATING: 3/10
Black Night Website/IMDB Click here
Black Night Trailer Click here
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