Very Scary and Underrated Ghost Story
Jason Tsai (Terry Chen), his wife Sarah (Jaime King) and their six year- old son Sam (Regan Oey) live in Shanghai and they need to travel to the Pacific Northwest in North America in the Hungry Ghost Month for the funeral of Jason's Uncle Raymond (Colin Foo). Raymond and Aunt Mei (Cheng Pei Pei) owned a family factory in the basement of their house, and Jason was raised by them. Further, Raymond founded a Benevolent Society fifty years ago and he was also known as The Bone Collector since he exhumed the bones of the immigrants and shipped them back to China.Sam begins to see spirits everywhere and a pharmacist (Henry O) feels that the boy and Sarah have sensitive souls and he advises that the Hungry Ghost Month is a dangerous period for people that can see spirits. He explains that angry ghosts can become demons and the realms of the living and the dead intercept and the dead can walk in the world of the living.
Sarah and Aunt Mei do not like each other but they stay in her house. Sooner Sam mysteriously falls into a coma and the doctors can not find an answer for his problem. Sarah sees the ghost of a woman and finds a grave box in the former factory. She returns to see the pharmacist and he tells that the box belonged to a woman named Shen-Lu. Further, he tells that Sarah needs to go to the world of the dead to retrieve the soul of her beloved son.
"They Wait" is a very scary and underrated ghost story, and one of the best I have seen this year. This DVD has been just released in Brazil and I had lower expectations based on the unfair IMDb User rating of 5.1.
The screenplay is very well written with a complex ghost story. The special effects are excellent and in right doses. The scene when the stranger asks Sam if he likes ghost is one of the best I have ever seen in horror films.
The beautiful Jaime King has great performance and I admire this actress very much since she is a survivor from heroin addiction. There are some minor mistakes in the edition that do not affect the final result. "They Wait", together with "Insidious" (2010), are the best horror films that I have seen this year. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "Espíritos Famintos" ("Hungry Spirits")
score 8/10
claudio_carvalho 21 December 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2535866/35508
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