Ghost blusters

>> They Wait is a hysterical but not-so-good
Canadian-Chinese ghost story

LOW SPIRITS: Jaime King and Regan Oe

by MARK SLUTSKY

There’s nothing wrong, on the face of it, with Canadian-financed genre pictures. In fact, there should probably be more of them; let us never forget that this country’s last cultural export may prove to be Bob Clark’s Porky’s. If there were more entertaining Canadian films that actually made money, we’d all win, even if they weren’t all Oscar (or... sigh... Genie) bait.

They Wait, from director Ernie Barbarash, is a Canadian-Chinese ghost story set mostly in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It’s a pretty straight-up horror movie, with murderous spirits, hidden bones, all-too-human bad guys, and women and children in peril. If only it were any good.

Semi-celebrity Jaime King (Sin City) plays Sarah, wife of Shanghai businessman Jason (Terry Chen) and mother to cute kid Sammy (Regan Oey). When Chen’s uncle dies, the family travels to Vancouver, where the late uncle was a big cheese in the immigrant Chinese community, for the funeral. Thing of it is, it happens to be Ghost Month, the time of year in the Chinese calendar when the spirits walk among the living.

Both King and the kid have a knack for seeing these spirits, and the ones they encounter aren’t too happy. In fact, the two begin to unravel a mystery—as aggrieved ghosts get all up in their faces—that goes back to the family’s early days in Chinatown, when the dead uncle in question ran a burial society that transported dead immigrants’ bones back to their native country for internment.

Would that they could have only executed this fairly basic spooky story with some competence. The special effects in this increasingly hysterical mess are bargain basement, and unfortunately, the acting is as well, the highlight being a scene where King gasps in horror at least five times in 30 seconds. There are some truly dispiriting moments, like the stock footage of an ambulance that doesn’t match the rest of the film at all.

But worst of all is that the story, which seems to have been initially undertaken with some sort of cultural sensitivity, is really about a scared white woman being menaced by the mysteries of the inscrutable Orient, which is something we should be way past by now.

They Wait opens this
Friday, Jan. 25

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