With Halloween around the corner the latest spook-fests inspire a trip back to the DVD shelf. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

Horror is defined as that which causes terror, fear or shock. That can rank as anything from the dead coming back to life, mythical monsters that aren't myths to good ol' fashioned bogeymen - literal or figurative. In our modern, enlightened age, the bogeyman is frequently explained away by psychology and most popular Western monsters have become sex symbols. Good horror now is most often rooted in the thing we can't personally control; the idea, act or creature we are unable to understand. There's a reason ghosts have clung to our collective heebie-jeebies' center for so long (even ardent agnostics will reserve judgment). Horror has also increasingly sprung from within the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, the left and the right and between any other inherently opposed social ideals.

Just in time for Halloween come a pair of horror offerings that tread in the ghost milieu and the horror of ideology. But The Second Sight from Thailand and the surprise summer hit, The Purge, couldn't hit their targets with a cannon. Sight's familiar "dead among us" story isn't the problem: Stories about one person able to see those not resting in peace make up some of the world's best ghost horror lore, from The Turn of the Screw to last summer's The Conjuring. Ghosts don't need contemporary "rebooting". They just need to be spooky. The Purge is a clever high concept "What if?" that doesn't exploit its massive potential. It's a John Carpenter movie made by an impersonator.

So where does it all go so wrong? Both films begin with simple narratives that should balloon out from their core concepts to great effect. In The Purge, the year is 2022 and the United States had regained its superpower status thanks in large part to the newly instigated government-sanctioned Purge Night. For a single 12-hour period each year all crime is subject to a sweeping amnesty that allows the American people to cleanse themselves of their violent impulses. It is the reason unemployment and crime are at record lows in a robust economy. Bearing the brunt of the murderous rage are the poor, the homeless and the infirm. The film follows James and Mary Sandin's (Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey, the new queen of genre lady badassery) during Purge Night gone wrong. Their skeptical son Charlie (Max Burkholder) gives refuge to a homeless black man (Edwin Hodge), bringing down the wrath of their rich white neighbors.

In The Second Sight, high-powered defense lawyer Jate (Nawat Kulratanarak) has been cursed since childhood with the ability to see others' "karmas", or what most of us would call the ghosts that haunt them. He's convinced you can't cheat fate or death, and so doesn't really do much with his knowledge. After winning an acquittal for a rapist-murderer (who's got some serious karma hovering around him), he's handed a case involving a spoiled teenaged brat, Kaew (Virapond Jirawetsuntorakul), who was speeding when she hit a bride and groom, their wedding photographer and inspired a multi-car crash. Meanwhile, Jate's songwriter girlfriend Jum (Ratha Phongam, Jan Dara, Nicolas Winding Refn's upcoming Only God Forgives) has the proverbial bad feeling about the case. And also, her piano is haunted.

The Purge had the potential to be a pithy, critical analysis of modern economic and racial dynamics and the speed with which we can resort to brutality (as a start), and it would have been in the hands of someone like the aforementioned Carpenter, who is a master of claustrophobic siege action and adept at revealing human nature even when the characters don't realize it. But it's not Carpenter, it's sophomore director James DeMonaco, whose most prominent credit thus far is the script for 2005's Assault on Precinct 13 (starring Hawke) - based on Carpenter's 1976 film. The curiosity factor has earned The Purge $87 million on a $3 million budget to date, so it's no surprise a sequel is in the works, so perhaps DeMonaco can correct his errors. Like the rampant lapses in logic (why do the marauding thugs need to wear disguises when they're breaking no laws?), teasing with ideas that go unexplored (we're compelled to see the stranger's dog tags, but the multitude of veterans' issues they imply go unaddressed), the lazy world-building of a future that evidently stopped developing at iPhone 4 and why the Sandins' daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane) spends the entire film dressed in schoolgirl fetish gear. DeMonaco is happy to riff on better films - among them Precinct 13, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange - and doesn't bother really delving into some of the timely and thought-provoking ideas The Purge flirts with. A missed opportunity is a bigger crime than simply being bad.

But if it's bad you want, haul out a bottle of Pinot Noir, skip dinner and check out The Second Sight. When the Thai film industry puts its mind to it, it can produce some of the creepiest horror in the world: The Victim and Shutter may be imperfect but they're loaded with standout images that get under the skin. But this time around the industry has produced a turkey that would make a lovely double bill of bad goodness with Roy Chow's equally riotous Murderer. Director Pornchai Hongratanaporn manages to create a few truly freaky moments (the dead crawling over a Bangkok monument, a haunted piano) and each raises hope that the film has turned a corner and is on the road to horror bliss. But that never happens. In what amounts to a Thai spin on The Sixth Sense, one ridiculous moment is compounded by the next and one laughably stilted line reading follows another. The highlight comes after The Big Twist, and results in what could be the most humiliating sequence any actor has been forced into to futile ends. The script does a major disservice to all of its actors (Kaew's entire wardrobe consists of hot pants) by dropping story threads and forcing them into untenable corners (if someone told you you'd fall from balcony would you immediately go stand beside a rickety one?). The Second Sight must be seen to be believed. It's hilarious.

The Purge and The Second Sight opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

(HK Edition 10/25/2013 page7)