Painful to Watch - The Eye (2008)

Finally, after a huge hiatus, we're back with an awful movie and another painful rant. In the past we covered the worst that the sword and sorcery can deliver, a forgotten Nickelodeon mess of a movie and an amateurish attempt at doing a movie about a man-ape with a giant cock. Today, instead, we'll see how Jessica Alba fucked up in "The Eye", a terrible movie that'll make you wish you were like its protagonist: blind.

"The Eye" is a 2008 American remake of a 2002 Chinese horror movie with the same title (that also spawned countless sequels). Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, both known for literally nothing and, arguably, both failed filmmakers, with Jessica Alba as the lead Sydney Wells, your perfect next-door girl who's also blind, and Alessandro Nivola as the most useless psychiatrist in the history of mankind, Dr. Paul Faulkner.

Basically the plot is that Sidney gets through a transplant the eyes of a dead mexican girl who sees ghosts and now she does too, until she doesn't, because then the movie shows her having different powers, that she apparently always had from the transplant, in the most incoherent and contradictory way, just to push forward a plot that was already sinking halfway through the movie. There's a clear problem with the plot direction in this movie and I want to remind you that not one, but two people directed this mess. 

Literally me forcing myself to watch this movie

One of the most puzzling questions I had during the whole duration of the movie was: Why nobody cares about the fact that the girl who just lived through the crazy trauma of acquiring eyesight says she sees things and has hallucinations that are proven to be harmful for herself and/or possibly for the others around her (from the start, like, before she is able to actually harm herself). And even then, it is not such a huge deal or anything, only that mf (Dr. Paul Faulkner) came to her, days after she was off the radar and only because her sister told him so, and he kept saying she's a quitter and a coward, without trying to actually figure out if she could have some mental issue or something that may need treatment.
I mean. C'mon, wtf.

Also, how do the ghosts know she can see 'em? Some of them just attack her or haunt her, does it mean they do that to everyone even without being seen or they somehow perceive the fact that she's able to see the dead?

And why does she have this incredible capacity to go where people died a la "Ghost Whisperer", I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I think I wouldn't find myself in places where someone violently died that often. Like ok, sometimes it can happen, but not literally everywhere I go.

I can't even find decent enough images for this movie. It seems there were no captivating scenes. Well, yeah, there weren't. At all.

I mean, should she be really that scared? Like, ok, I get it, but it kinda bothers me that her first reaction is fear and not curiosity, like, you have never seen anything before, how do you even know the difference between a scary face and not scary one? How do you know how to distinguish between normal and abnormal? I guess she had eyesight for 5 years of her life, so I can close an eye on that point (no puns intended, really).

It feels very cheap overall. Bland directing, cinematography, effects, acting and plain bad writing.

Everything is so damn plot convenient it's unrealistic, even trying to apply the suspension of disbelief, to the point it's infuriating.
Also, everything felt already seen (no puns intended, again), one cliché after another, and it's so freaking boring I swear I thought of stopping the movie and sleeping. It doesn't happen very often, trust me. It's incosistent, lazy, dumb and sometimes even nonsensical.

What a mess.

Chapeau to the directors to have achieved the goal of having no real tension in any given shot

I hope that the original one at least is kinda better, otherwise why even bother to remake it? And why remake a movie in the first place? Dubbing is a thing (actually I watched it dubbed in Italian because I didn't want to concentrate too much on it and I didn't care) and c'mon, reading subs is really that hard? But this discussion is for another day.

Is it one of the worst movies ever? Not really. 

Is it one of the worst mediocre high budget horror movies ever? Arguably. 

Is it one of my least favorite movies ever? Probably yes.

I never mentioned that here, but if you scroll through my Letterboxd reviews you can find this idea of mine fairly often, but bad horror movie after bad horror movie, I'm always more sure that the main issue of many of those movies is that they try too hard to be horror. There's no mystery because we know the answer and the reasons from the very first scene, just because the movie wants us to be scared and unnerved everytime immediately, failing. Obviously.

If you want to read more english articles click here and don't forget to follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews!

PAINFUL REVIEW BY