STUDIO: Lionsgate
RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2008
STARRING: Jessica Alba, Alessandro Nivola, Parker Posey, Rade Serbedzija, Fernanda Romero, Rachel Ticotin, and Obba Babatunde
WRITTEN BY: Sebastian Gutierrez
DIRECTED BY: David Moreau and Xavier Palud
FEATURES: “Birth of the Shadowman”
“Becoming Sydney”
“Shadow World: Seeing the Dead”
“The Eye: The Explosive Grand Finale”
Deleted Scenes
Digital Copy of The Eye
Theatrical Trailer

The Asian horror fest continues to creep along, as Hollywood’s latest poster girl for Far East frights, Jessica Alba, now finds her way to DVD in The Eye. Alba stars as eye transplant recipient, Sydney Wells, in the North American remake of the first film in the Pang Brother’s successful Hong Kong Eye trilogy. Although there was some buzz behind the Hollywood-ized version before it hit theaters in 2007, The Eye didn’t capture the hearts and minds of horrors fans in the same manner as the original movie did with overseas audiences. Was it a bad movie, or has the Asian remake craze runs its course? What should fans expect from a PG-13 horror movie? Either way, given the evolution of the horror genre in the last couple of years, The Eye is much better off on DVD. But - and this is a big BUT – a true 2-Disc Special Edition this is not.

Although The Eye didn’t break North American ground like The Ring and The Grudge, it does have a successful and interesting lineage. When The Eye (aka Gin Gwai) was released in 2002 in Asia, the movie put sibling filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang on the cinematic map. Given the popularity of their overseas hit, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood execs would try to duplicate success for American moviegoers. And that’s where it often goes downhill for Asian remakes since each audience – Asian and American – reacts to different things within the horror genre. Asian films are often slow, methodical, and highly suspenseful without a lot of upfront and obvious scares while American audiences love larger than life horror heroes, blood, guts, torture, and tension all wrapped into one. When The Grudge and The Ring sparked the Asian remake craze a few years ago, American moviegoers were infatuated by how different they were from the Freddy Kreuger’s of the horror world. When a flood of similar films and sequels followed, everyone got bored. The Eye might have faired better if it was one of the forerunners of the remake phase instead of one of late entries.

As for the story… After losing her sight as a child, Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) undergoes an eye transplant in her twenties to restore her vision. Sydney soon begins to see things (aka dead people), shadowy figures that appear to be escorting the departed to another world. When you make a film where the lead character sees dead people, you know what you’re going to get from critics and fans – the obvious comparison to M. Night Shyamalan’s famous ghost flick. While the film itself doesn’t break ground, sticking to conventional horror devices utilized in similarly based films (people who see dead people), underneath The Eye is where the most interesting aspect of the film can be found, namely the notion of cellular memory. According to accounts and theories, worldwide transplant recipients have reported to feel, see, taste, and crave various real world things that their now-dead donors used to enjoy. Although the film’s execution leaves a lot to be desired, cellular memory is worth exploring away from the movie.

As a DVD, The Eye doesn’t help the film’s chances on the DVD market to a great degree. There’s only roughly 20-minutes of bonuses, total. The Eye serves up an abbreviated dose of entertainment value for those who just want to stare at Jessica Alba for more than 97-minutes, those who’d rather download the movie to their handheld, and those fans who want to explore more of the movie in 20 minutes or less. Aside from the included digital copy of the film on the second disc, the set also boasts a few mildly entertaining deleted scenes, the standard trailer, and a featurettes section of the first disc, which focuses on everything from Alba’s Sidney character and spooky visuals to the phenomenon of cellular memory. The “Shadow World: Seeing the Dead” only scratches the surface on cellular memory (like a primer for deeper independent investigation), but does offer up a couple of interesting real life stories about what transplant recipients have craved after being given new body parts..

Overall, The Eye isn’t the worst horror remake we’ve seen, but it’s certainly not the best. It’s about what we expected before we saw it in theaters. However, we were expecting more from the 2-Disc Special Edition DVD.