Anna's Eve Movie Review

Weird connection - some of the folks who worked on Anna's Eve were also involved with the 2002 movie Love And A Bullet, and select crew from that went on to make April Fools, the abysmal slasher movie. Perhaps I should seek out Love And A Bullet to see if I can understand the mystery of how the people who made it went on to make separate but equally amateurish horror films that seem like no one involved understood how horror WORKS.
But whereas April Fools had some lovingly stupid moments (and who can forget "People call me POOP"?) and had the good sense to come in at 72 minutes, this overlong (95 minutes) bore is free of anything that can be considered amusing. At no point do the actors seem to realize that the movie they are acting out is pretty pointless and dull and thus maybe they should try to spice it up a bit by over-acting. It's almost kind of remarkable in a way; the back-story involves a social work case gone horribly wrong, and Grayce Wey's script (in which she stars as the main character) manages to make the ghost/murder scenes just as uninteresting as the ones involving writing up follow up reports about certain child welfare cases.
And director Kantz (that's the whole name) is no help, botching the few scare scenes that are actually on-screen. Most just occur entirely in our imagination; at one point a character seemingly runs to safety only for some dialogue in the next scene to inform us that she was actually killed. A good director would at least show the ghost running after her or popping up in their path, which would be a "good enough" choice if they weren't able/willing to actually SHOW the kill, but Kantz doesn't roll that way, I guess. This also leads to plain ol' confusion at times, particularly in the opening sequence. The movie starts awkwardly anyway; I thought the DVD had somehow skipped the first chapter as it seemingly starts mid-scene, but then the main character goes into a house and sees... SOMETHING, which causes her to scream as we cut to the main titles. Then it's "eight months later" and she's now addicted to pills and driving a different car, so whatever she saw was pretty important - why the hell didn't they SHOW it then? Again, we just hear it through dialogue, as if Kantz had come from the radio drama world and hadn't gotten used to the idea of working in a visual medium yet.
Now, off-screen kills can be fine if they serve a more interesting or twisty story, but this one is just the usual "ghost seeks revenge for her death/improper burial" thing that you've seen in a million Asian horror flicks, and we even get a scare ripped off directly from Ju-On for good measure. Plus their attempts at twists just render the story incoherent - the "bad guy" is not actually the killer, and his actions/character motivations are constantly at odds with one another (without spoiling too much - though I don't know why I'd bother - he sure has a weird way of showing how devoted he is to the woman he loves). Worse, the ghost doesn't even seem to distinguish between who killed her and who is just kind of a jerk; it's almost like she SIDES with her killer because somehow deep down she knows the other guy is really to blame. It'd be like if the Poltergeist ghost confronted the Freelings and was like "Look, I know you didn't know that you built the home over my grave, so just give me the address of your boss and I'll go haunt him instead." In short, a rational ghost is not a scary one (and my example isn't even as stupid as what happens here).