WORST ASIAN HORROR MOVIES: Hospital (Taiwan, 2020)
Heavily hyped with a spooky trailer, this movie is set at one of Taiwan's most haunted locations. So a movie about it should have been a no-brainer, right?
DISCLAIMER: This review contains affiliate links to purchase this movie. Clicking on any of the images in the video will take you to Play-Asia for your consideration.
I don’t even know where we should start with this disaster, so how about we try and understand what this movie is about?
PLOT
Father and son taoist priests host an event in an abandoned hospital where they help people communicate with their departed loved ones. Their latest customers are a pregnant woman with a missing husband and the sister of a nurse who committed suicide.
Their skills and talent are taken to the limit when a series of strange and creepy incidents occur in the hospital.
This movie is filmed at the site voted the most haunted location in all of Taiwan by Taiwanese netizens.
Let’s explore a few reasons why this movie is bad.
BAD ACTING (and BAD EDITING)
I’m combining these two together as there seems to be a complete lack of continuity in some scenes, and the actors are partly to blame.
It feels like they just rushed through this movie, as it evident by the overreliance on CGI in the movie. It takes over scenes, and with so much work done in post-production, it didn’t leave much for the actors to do on set.
The bad editing starts early, when a long shot of the reality crew is not long enough, as the mouth of the reporter is still visible, and she is clearly out of sync.
The two female leads though. Just not good. It reminds me of an amateur movie where the characters only act when they are saying a line, and at all other times they’re just scenery. It happens here, there’s only emotion when they’re doing something, otherwise they might as well not be there.
ILLOGICAL STORYLINE
We’ve covered the storyline already but lets be honest, when you need an org chart, a scatter plot, a gantt timeline and both Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint open to track the movie, you know you’ve fucked up somewhere.
REALLY CRAPPY CGI
If you’re a fan or 70’s, 80’s and even 90’s horror, and Asian horror in the early 2000’s, you’d be very familiar with the use of practical effects for horror movies. Latex masks and wounds, a thick red coloured liquid for water, and double exposure effects on film negatives used to create ghosts.
But now, that’s all been replaced with crappy CGI. And in this movie, the crappiness couldn’t be more obvious.
There is a real obvious example, that when coupled with the bad acting, really shows the lack of quality in this film.
There is a scene where a hand and arm emerge from a hole in the wall and try to choke Mrs Su. In the good old movie making days, or even in this CGI age if you had a competent crew, you’d use a real arm, and then using matching footage you’d remove the arm from the scene. Kind of like how they used to remove the wires from shots in the 80s and 90s.
The effect of this then means that a real arm is attacking the actress, allowing her to actually act as if she is getting choked. But in this movie, they’ve decided to CGI the arm in, meaning she has nothing to act with. Considering her mostly dial-it-in effort for the film, this scene just highlights one of many mistakes made.
In this modern CGI age, the best thing to do was film a real arm, and then digitally remove it from the scene as it’s being splashed with the water. But they went down the easy route.
CONFUSING ENDING
A horror movie, specifically horror movies like this, are made for entertainment only. This isn’t a thinking-persons horror movie, so don’t make it like such.
The audience for a movie like this doesn’t want to spend hours trying to piece together bits of information to try and make sense of what they’ve seen. If you’re doing that for a movie like this, you’ve failed.
I’m guessing the intention was to force the audience to watch it twice, to work out the gaps. But this isn’t the type you film you’d watch more than once.
Conversely, don’t insult the audience by spending 5 or 10 minutes explaining every little bit to them. I remember the first Silent Hill movie doing that, and I really hated that scene. It slowed the pace of the movie right down.
This movie had many many opportunities throughout it to ensure the audience wasn’t left scratching their heads thinking WTF, and it failed miserably.
A shame, it could have been a movie I could have covered on the Must Watch series instead…
What are my overall thoughts?
There’s too much wrong with this movie to even try and make it right.
When I can think of half a dozen different theories about what the movie is about, and a multitude of ways it could be fixed, then I know that the filmmakers have failed to produce what they hoped to – to create a mindless and entertaining horror movie.
But one theory about this movie is correct. It’s a terrible film, one of the Worst Modern Asian Horror movies.
If you’ve seen it, what did you think?
Genre Horror
Director Chia-Lin Chu
Starring Tai Bo, Austin Lin, Chih-ying Chu
Original Title 杏林医院
Country of Origin Taiwan
Release Date December 31 2020