The Arrow Reviews

"We are all here, just because we are a group of abandoned." 

I had no idea what RE-CYCLE was about when sitting down in my theatre seat. All I knew is that it was the new Pang Brothers movie and that was enough for my ass. Having loved their breakout film THE EYE and appreciated on some level THE EYE 2, I always anticipate whatever project their names are tagged on, whether together or individually. Hit or miss, one thing is for certain with these champs, you’ll usually get pleasantly visually assaulted with their films. In Re-cycle’s case that was an understatement.

Re-cycle almost played as two films within one. The first 45 minutes or so was The Dark Half meets The Eye, with a compelling initial premise of a writer seeing her words come to life with all kinds of creepy spirit shenanigans whopping in. The fear set pieces here put the ones found in their debut to shame. I jumped out of my seat like a frog with a firecracker up its cracker and was creeped out many oh times. The Pang Brothers were obviously on top of their game with the commanding use of stylish images and the effectual use of eerie sounds teaming up to scaring my socks off silly. Granted it did feel like a Pang Brothers “Best of” at times with elements lifted off both The Eye and The Eye 2. But on this run, their talent was obviously better tuned and more bucks was on the screen. And then it happened.

The film pulled a fast one on me and what was so far a semi claustrophobic and nerve tingling ghost in every corner story became an epic “Alice in Horror Land” adventure, with a neato concept (think a PC Recylcle Bin but for spirits) and that also reminded me so much of the recently released SILENT HILL, the good parts. I was agreeably dragged into countless other worlds one that had to be seen to believed. I don’t want to reveal too much but I’ll say this to tantalize you: “an amusement park from hell with a pendulum swinging pirate ship”, “a maze of live, dangling from the ceiling fetus…under red water”, “a raining of live undead cadavers” and…well you know what…that’s all I’ll disclose. The film really went all out in sucking me in these awe inspiring, gorgeously morbid and totally far-out settings. And the polished imagery, insane camera shots, brilliant used of color palettes and the overwhelming score tagged to them made it all so much more hypnotizing. Now that’s what I call an ambitious film and then some!

Aesthetic delicacies weren’t the only thing the film on the menu. Throughout its trek a couple of well-placed human themes were sneaked in. Now I won’t list them all but lets just say that “abandonment” was a strong idea here and when applied hard enough, I was touched and moved by it. Tag to all that, a strong, endearing and emotional lead in actress Sinje Lee for us to hold on to, a couple of predictable yet still stirring “surprise relationships”, genuine moments of pure tension and a twist ending that didn’t make total sense but yet did and you get one for the freaking horror book of classics. Any negatives to puke out! Well the film did get redundant at some point (I don't need to hear the description of the area 3 times), went on for a tad too long and the basis behind the madness worked but didn’t fully hold together when looking back.

With that Kit Kat spat, I’m giving this film a perfect score none the less. Why? Because I haven’t seen this much spirit, overall superior artistry, LSD crazy creativity and eye-popping horror friendly scenarios in a long time. Not to this degree. This flick aimed higher than aiming higher than the norm and it the mark 95% of the time. Now this is a f*cking horror film! Get recycled with Re-cycle!

VISIT THE OFFICIAL RE-CYCLE SITE HERE