The Bridge Curse

 

The Bridge Curse (2020)

Dir. Lester Hsi

Written by Keng-Ming Chang, Po-Hsiang Hao

Starring Janine Chang, Cheng Ko, J.C. Lin, Summer Meng, Vera Yen, Wan-Ru Zhan

 

 

 

            Holy moly, it’s a movie from the year of our lord 2020! I know you probably associate this blog with endless, overwritten blarney about terrible, justly obscure low-budget horror drivel from the distant past, but here’s one young enough to not even realize the unholy aberrance of the hellscape it was born into. Granted, it’s still terrible, justly obscure low-budget horror drivel. Wouldn’t want to ruin my perfect streak with something halfway decent.

 

            You may wonder what brought me to this particular bit of terrible, justly obscure low-budget horror drivel. The answer is: nothing in particular. It’s not like I got a tip that it was a hidden gem, or it had an irresistible title, or awesome poster art, or that I had any reason at all to think it would be remotely watchable. In fact, I had every reason to assume it would be dismal garbage. October is a purely volume enterprise at this point in my horror career. I mean, you watch as many horror movies as I do, and it doesn’t take that long at all before you’ve watched basically every single movie which might be remotely good, and even the vast majority of movies which are terrible in some distinct or interesting way. It’s not just that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked; the tree is fucking barren. The only things left to scavenge are the rotted detritus lying around the trunk, eschewed by everyone but the most masochistic addicts. Which is, it turns out, an oddly freeing experience. With no possibility whatsoever of watching anything good, the anxiety of trying to be choosey evaporates, and you can just throw on whatever random garbage happens to roll by in your line of eyesight, and it’s going to be just as good as anything else.

 

            Or anyway, that’s what I thought when I clicked on THE BRIDGE CURSE. But if that’s true, it bodes extremely ill for the rest of this month, because Jesus Christ, this is the bottom of a very empty barrel indeed. 

 

 

            We begin –as I suppose it was inevitable we would—with found footage. Seems that a bunch of Taiwanese college kids are fucking around with a cursed bridge, and you better believe their cell phones are out to incoherently capture the whole thing (one of them even has a fancy camera with a tripod, although, out of what I can only assume to be sheer spite on the filmmakers’ part, we will not be getting any of that footage). Someone walks up some steps in a way which causes the onlookers anxiety. A chair clatters around, all by itself. Spooky stuff. It ends with narration ominously inviting us to examine a faint gray smudge in the top right corner of the image, which it intimates might just be a glimpse of the fabled “Female Bridge Ghost” who is presumably the source of the titular bridge curse, although nobody ever refers to it by that name in the movie. Weirdly, we will almost immediately learn that the faint gray smudge is just an inconsequential camera smudge, so I’m not sure why they bother to emphasize that particular detail right at the get-go. But I’m not sure why they bother with a lot of things.

 

            For example, I’m not sure why most of the first 20 minutes or so is found footage, but after that we rapidly drop the conceit entirely and everything else is shot conventionally. I’m not complaining, mind you, just… why? I suppose it has to do with the framing narrative, where a plucky reporter (Vera Yen, TAKE ME TO THE MOON) on what I presume is a very slow news day, is researching the story of the female bridge ghost. But then, I’m not sure why they bothered with that, either. It definitely smacks of a production which realized when they finally edited everything that they only had 65 minutes of footage, and had to go back and do some second-unit framing-story filler to get to feature-length. At any rate, we will now be spending a not-insubstantial amount of the runtime watching an actress playing a reporter watching the movie we’re also watching, and narrating the events we are seeing, for what I can generously describe as “no good reason at all.”

 

gripping, gripping stuff.

 

 

            Still, watching a young woman half-curiously flicking through security footage and file folders while narrating aloud the events of the story isn’t substantially duller than the purported A-plot. That involved a group of college students at Tunghai University, Taiwan, who decide to film themselves participating in a “courage test” on the aforementioned “female ghost bridge.” Several reviews mention that this is based on a real urban legend on campus, though I can find no independent confirmation of this fact (the Wikipedia page for the university doesn’t mention any hauntings, although it does note that then-president Richard Nixon spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony in 1953, leaving open the possibility that a different part of campus is cursed by a “Male US President ghost.” Now that’s a sequel I’d like to see!). To the surprise of no one, they quickly find themselves getting picked off by a ghost with a penchant for drowning (I wonder if she knows THE DROWNSMAN?), because, you know, bridge ghost. This is made somewhat easier for the offending spirit by the fact that the students all have a distinct tendency to wander off alone, and also by the fact that for some reason they all live in the “abandoned town,” an decaying, desolate, and completely isolated structure which is, as near as I can tell, maintained by the university solely for the convenience of housing cursed students while the haunting runs its course.

 

What follows is a thorough and unswerving recital of every single one of the most shameless ghost movie gimmicks in the book (uh oh! The ghost is silently standing behind someone! Now she’s making a ruckus in the bathroom stall next door! Now she’s lurking under your covers while you’re trying to hide!), and absolutely nothing else of any kind. It’s brutally dull going, but at least it’s reasonably eventful, and the film is pretty short. There is not a single beat that you haven’t seen done –and done better—at least a dozen times before, but hey, compared to the Blumhouse hegemony in the US, this is practically fuckin EVIL DEAD, so it could be worse, I suppose. The movie tries to get fancy only once, with a confounding timeline rug-pull near the very end. I’m not sure if this late-movie twist is too mind-blowing for me to entirely grasp, or if it just makes no sense, but hey, at least it’s a thought; nothing else about the screenplay suggests even that low level of ambition, so I’ll take what I can get. It certainly makes more sense than the never-elaborated-upon assertion that the students are for some reason “assigned to the abandoned town.” Wha? Is this a more common part of college life than I realized? Anybody else have fond memories of spending that semester in a haunted, empty dorm building with your five friends and no one else to hear your screams? I too have lived in some grim (and in fact, specifically haunted) off-campus housing, but at least I had neighbors. And no one demanded that I participate in a “courage test.”

 

Anyway, THE BRIDGE CURSE sucks, but it’s not like it ever tried to claim otherwise. I mean, look at that fuckin’ poster. It’s not pretending to be anything it ain’t. You fuck around with a cursed bridge, you can’t be too surprised when you end up cursed. It’s right there in the name, idiot. Similarly, I’d have to be a pretty big asshole to look at that poster, knowingly click on it, and then complain about getting exactly what I was promised. These guys got a cursed bridge, I got a cursed queue. My bad, this one’s on me. 

 

 

 

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2020 CHECKLIST!

The Man Who Queue Too Much

 

TAGLINE	The English posters get nothing, but thanks to the awesome power of Google translate I can now confirm that the Taiwanese poster says something to the chilling effect of: “The new topic of the producers of ‘Little Girl in Red Farm’ and ‘Zongxie, adapted from the campus ghost live broadcast event.” Or, in another poster, “Live e-sports! Millions of netizens lose heart to WITNESS THE REAL GHOSTS!”
TITLE ACCURACY	More of a haunted bridge, methinks, but yes, it is definitely a bridge.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No, possibly inspired by a true story, or so the tagline would imply.
SEQUEL?	None, but the ending definitely leaves the possibility wide open.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Taiwan
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghosts, J-Horror-ripoff, curses
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None, although one unfortunate young lady is wearing a very situation-inappropriate midriff shirt.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None, although we are told that the bridge ghost was gang-raped, which is a lot of fun.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	Yes, one room in the abandoned campus was obviously used by the … hair styling department? And you better believe the ghost is gonna have a field day with that shit.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Just of the brief, found-footage variety.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Just say “no” to cursed courage tests. They’re one of the top five killers of students living in the abandoned town.