Mid-July Days

七月半之恐怖宿舍

China, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 91 mins.

Directors: Liu Hong 刘鸿, Du Xiao’ao 杜潇傲.

Rating: 5/10.

More than solid, well-directed campus horror falls on its face in the final furlong.

STORY

A city in central China, summer, the present day. First-year university student An Lan (Yu Xintian) arrives early but is shown the way to her dormitory by a college senior (Ma Yuan), who explains that she’s been assigned to a renovated overflow building due to the increased number of students. An Lan finds the first night on her own in Room 314 a bit creepy but she’s soon joined by her roommates: perky Li Jiayu (Xu Qian), Zhu Jing (Chen Meixing) who failed to get into Hong Kong University, and spoilt princess Yang Panpan (Fu Man). The moody, anti-social Zhu Jing studies 18 hours a day and always seems stressed; Li Jiayu is always bouncy and positive; and party girl Yang Panpan starts a relationship with college hunk Han Xi (Kong Ming), even though An Lan suspects he is still seeing another student, Jiang Xue (Hou Xu). One night, Yang Panpan and Li Jiayu drag An Lan out to a karaoke bar where she meets Han Xi’s roommate, post-graduate research student Shen Yi (Zhai Zimo). He later tries to date her, but she doesn’t encourage him. On the eve of the mid-July Hungry Ghost Festival Li Jiayu says she’s heard a story that 10 years ago Shen Weiyang, a post-graduate student in the same dormitory building, committed suicide by fire after experiencing scary visions; later, all her other roommates either died or went mad, so the university closed the building. Li Jiayu doesn’t know if they were also in Room 314, but from a photo of the four she’s noticed that An Lan looks remarkably like Shen Weiyang. After the Ghost Festival is over, An Lan finds she has increasing nightmares, as well as visions of a young woman in a red dress. Zhu Jing’s nightmares also increase and she is diagnosed with neurasthenia. Despite that, she tries to commit suicide one evening and is only saved by her roommates. The four are moved into a new building and things start to seem rosier. But then Zhu Jing takes an overdose and Yang Panpan ends up in hospital after discovering Han Xi has two-timed her. An Lan decides to investigate the Shen Weiyang affair, starting by interviewing dormitory concierge Auntie Wang (Shang Lifen).

REVIEW

Liu Hong 刘鸿, one of the producers behind The Death Is Here 笔仙惊魂 (2012) and The Death Is Here III 笔仙惊魂3 (2014) – both directed by Guan Er 关尔 – starts a new franchise with Mid-July Days 七月半之恐怖宿舍, exchanging the ouija board-like game bixian 笔仙 for the summer Hungry Ghost Festival 中元节/盂兰盆 as a horror hook. Liu, who also gives himself the lead directing credit alongside overseas-educated newcomer Du Xiao’ao 杜潇傲, has brought over some players (Yu Xintian 余心恬, Fu Man 付曼, Zhai Zimo 翟子陌) from the Death films, and the result is a more than solid campus horror that jogs along for most of the going before falling on its face in the final furlong.

There’s nothing new about the plot – four college roommates find themselves spooked out, maybe by the “ghost” of a suicidee a decade earlier – but the set-up is economical, things keep moving, and there’s little time wasted on BFF stuff or taking lots of showers between the shocks. Representing the audience’s POV as in Death III, Yu, 27, manages to ground the film without showing any special talent as her character, a sensible first-year student, finds herself having nightmares along with her roommates. Bringing more personality to the table, and looking much more confident than in Death III, Fu sashays in and out as the spoilt princess of the group. Of the other two, Chen Meixing 陈美行, another graduate of the Guan low-budget school, is the more interesting, though she mostly looks just moody and anti-social. The men hardly register, with Chen Kun 陈坤 lookalike Zhai (aka Zhai Wenbin 翟文斌), a horror regular (The Death Is Here; The Deadly Strands 丝•咒, 2013), getting the most screen time.

The movie’s two major weaknesses both stem from its failure to get around Mainland rules on ghosts and the supernatural in a creative way. Though its date is embedded in the film’s Chinese title – which means “Mid-July: Dormitory of Terror” – the Hungry Ghost Festival is only mentioned in passing, which seems a bit pointless. (The festival has formed the basis of whole films in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan.) More feeble, however, is the way the writers deal with the need to provide a logical solution to all the “haunting”. Sometimes this Mainland proscription can prove a creative trigger, forcing writers to create stories that actually make sense; but here the solution to the mystery is simply downloaded in a 10-minute chunk of flashbacks and backstory involving characters whom the audience is not familiar with and in whom it therefore has no emotional investment.

After the first hour, with its gradual accretions of mystery, that comes as a disappointment – and knocks a potentially 6/10 movie down a point. In other departments, the film is quite inventive, with a large part set inside the girls’ dormitory room without any sense of confinement and with the rest of the university sketched in just a few scenes. Direction is clean and good-looking, with minimum flash and often in short sequences separated by fades.

For this kind of modest horror, Days grossed a reasonable RMB12 million on release. A second film in the franchise, Past and Present 七月半2  前世今生, starring actress Chen and directed by Li Hongjian 李红建 (regular cameraman for Death director Guan), is due to be released on 19 Aug 2016.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing China Film Legend Film & TV Culture (CN).

Script: Yun Momo, Bei Bao, Yang Liu. Photography: Hua Jia’nan. Editing: Luo Wei, Li Jian. Music direction: Zhang Mengmeng. Art direction: Zhang Weidong. Styling: Han Lu, Zhao Yiran. Sound: Qu Peng, Xu Hongfei. Executive direction: Xu Weixiang, Gu Yafei, Wang Ning.

Cast: Yu Xintian (An Lan; Shen Weiyang), Ma Yuan (Huang Mao), Zhai Zimo (Shen Yi), Xu Qian (Li Jiayu), Fu Man (Yang Panpan), Chen Meixing (Zhu Jing), Kong Ming (Han Xi), Dai Zixiang (Tian Qi, teacher), Peng Qian (Qiu Ze), Liang Liwen (Wen Wan), Qiao Zihan (Gu Xiangqing), Zhan Mengyao (Liu Lin), Shang Lifen (Auntie Wang, dormitory concierge), Hou Xu (Jiang Xue, Han Xi’s girlfriend), Guan Jianqing (Tian Qi’s assistant).

Release: China, 14 Aug 2015.