The Maid

Solid Asian horror flick
Like a lot of the other reviewers, I'm a big fan of Asian horror of all kinds--I had overlooked this modest little film until now, but it was reasonably entertaining and, despite the occasional silliness, has a cohesive plot and some good effects. (There's a very brief moment when the shadow of a passing coffin falls over a young woman's face, which then contorts into the most terrifying expression I've ever seen. I don't know if it was CGI or not, but it's *really* creepy.)

It's not exactly non-stop terror and the young heroine's cluelessness occasionally gets irritating, but I still found it preferable to some of the earlier j- and k-horror movies that suffer from disjointed plots and ridiculous inconsistencies. Stylistically, it's much closer to the Pang brothers' Eye movies.

Maid to Scare.... vIDEO PROBELM With the dvd... STAY AWAY from this release!!!!
This is a film that was produced in Singapore, where my inital thought, that this film just wanted to capitalise on the current unstoppable flow of horror films that seem to follow from the asian countries. Add to that a title that seems even more tacky... I wasn't expecting much... But i was indeed in for a shock.....

The Maid; like it's title, is a tale that is centered around a domestic helper, aged 18, who has travelled to the Philippines to Singapore, in hope to earn money so as to provide a better life for her family back home. Situation is such that money is urgently required to save her ill brother back home.

She is employed by an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Teo who have a mentally-handicapped son Ah Soon. The relationship between all of them is good, and all seems to go well.

In chinese mythology, the 7th month of the Lunar Calendar is widely considered the Hungry Ghost festival - when the gates of hell swing open and for 30 days, the dead walk...

Another atmospheric ghost story from the far east.
The Maid (Kelvin Tong, 2005)

Now, I'll say right off that, yes, the critics of this movie have it right: there's nothing here we haven't seen before. But you know what? There are thirty-six plots. Total. (And that's the liberal estimate. I've seen the estimate for the total number of plots in the world whittled down to nine convincingly.) As Al Jourgensen said back in the early nineties, "it's all been done already." What you have to try and do, if you're a writer, or a musician, or a filmmaker, is to present it another way, with your own style. I've seen a lot of derivative Asian horror movies recently, and of the lot, The Maid stands out. Why? Because Kelvin Tong has a lot more style than those other guys.

Alessandra de Rossi plays Rosa Dimaano, a young Filipino woman hired as a housekeeper by a cosmopolitan, if old-school, couple in Singapore, the Teos (Huifang Hong and Shucheng Chen). The Teos have a mentally challenged son, Ah-Soon (Benny Soh), and Rosa and...

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