Hospital is a Chinese horror movie directed and written by Chia-Lin Chu. It’s been a while since I have watched any Asian horror movies, so I decided to see this one, since I am a sucker for abandoned haunted hospitals and stories revolving around them. This one is about two women stricken with grief, one lost her husband in a routine operation in that hospital, another one lost her sister who was a nurse there and killed herself by jumping out of the window. They hire an Tao exorcist and his son to take them there to make them speak with the dead to get kind of closure. As things go in such movies, everything goes wrong and then interesting ghost haunted story turns into mixture of mindfuck psychological horror and haunted vengeful ghost story. Everything is done pretty naive, characters are plastic and you can not get into any of them and wish them to make it out. The twist at the end is already seen thousands of times and made it only worse. Ghosts are okay, there are one or two creepy situations that make your skin crawl, but in all, this is one of the not so good Asian horror movies I have watched and now I wish I chose something better, but next time.
I found this anthology when I was an avid reader of anything Graham Masterson wrote, being one of my favorite horror authors. So, I got to read this one, and check out his short story, also Dan Simmons being my favorite I wanted to read his share of this anthology, together with Ray Bradbury and couple of other names that I know and a bunch of horror authors didn’t have a honor to read yet. But, this 500 plus pages monster is not what I thought it would be. Besides three above mentioned authors rest of the stories are not on the level. On the contrary, most are under. As is with any anthology, some stories are better, some not, but this one lacks great stories. Based mostly in body horror, sexual related horror stories and also psychological serial killers, this anthology is for those who still do not know what they want with their horror. Give me Lovecraft related horror stories and novels every day. This one is to avoid. Better spend time reading something better. I will soon tell you what if you read this webzine.
I found somewhere that Koji Suzuki is called Japanese Stephen King. Well I read his famous Ringu, which was a base for Japanese Ring movies and also couple of American remake and its sequels and spinoffs. Ringu was fine book. Dark Water was also made into a movie, which also got American remake, but this one was not based on a novel, but on a short story from this short story compilation by Suzuki. Each of the stories is in fact one chapter, but you might have guessed it, common denominator to all of the stories is water, whether being in tank on top of the building, or ocean, or lake, water is crucial to horror in each of the stories. As in any short story collection, some are great, some are boring. What bothers me about this collection is that horror creeps too slow and it is hard to keep you as a reader concentrated because it is too slow and even boring in some parts, although there are couple of creepy moments in there. This one is not what I was hoping for to be, so if you want to read something by Koji Suzuki, better read his novel Ringu.
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