Here we go, another local film that falls flat on its face. We try not to be skeptical (it’s not easy), but considering the amount of substandard local films that we’ve had to sit through for more than a decade, we can clearly say that Ghost on Air is one of the most inept and ludicrous we’ve seen. Newbie director Cheng Ding An’s horror flick is a hodgepodge of ideas that could have been compelling, but its narrative is so badly strung together that none of the characters actually cohere or make sense by the end of the film.
Ping Xiao (an overacting Dennis Zhou Chongqing) is a popular DJ who gets relegated to the graveyard shift following bad press. To regain his popularity and conquer his fear and painful memory of his recently deceased girlfriend and ex-horror novelist Jia Yi (Gan Mei Yan), he begins narrating her ghost stories on air. Soon enough, he gets possessed by these stories, first by checking himself into a decrepit shophouse that Jia Yi once stayed in, and in the process, making contact with the many apparitions that appear in her supposedly fictional works. There are so many sub characters thrown in, including that of Jia Yi’s impregnated best friend, a young school girl who gets raped, the rapist who committed suicide and a loony, aging caretaker, but by film’s end you’ll realize that they have absolutely nothing to do with the film’s overall thrust.
Not only is the story subpar, the acting is unconvincing throughout. Except for the film’s haunting first scene of Jia Yi submerging her face into a pail of water, the rest of the film is confusing, whitewashed crap, and a complete waste of time. Get this off the air immediately.