My limitless love for Asian ghost girl movies brought me here, but does this franchise live up to the best that Asian ghost girl movies have to offer? Let’s find out.
THE TAG-ALONG (2015)
I really liked this movie’s little ghost girl creature in a red dress. She’s super creepy, but she’s also heavily CGI when she moves, so the ghost feels a lot more disconnected from reality than those in classics like Ringu and Ju-on (that is…you know…if you believe in ghosts as part of reality). Not to mention, the film simply doesn’t build the kind of feelings of dread you get from those classics.
It also fails to build a good backstory for the ghost, and it just felt to me like the whole plot falls apart by the end, with too many confusing elements coming into play and an unclear finale.
We meet a young man and his grandmother. He leaves for work, and she is terrorized by something with little hands. He returns from work, she’s acting weird and leaves, and then his face is attacked by those little hands in what is possibly the best moment in the movie.
Meanwhile, he’s been pressuring his girlfriend to get married and have a family. She is totally resistant.
After some disturbing behavior, the boyfriend disappears, and the girlfriend delves into the supernatural possibilities of his absence.
She has nightmares of the girl in red, she has an uncle do a sort of cleansing of the boyfriend’s apartment (which is a kind of funny scene), and all roads of her very weakly unfolding investigation lead to a search and rescue team heading for a haunted mountain.
The plot is seriously lacking, the legend of the girl in red is poorly explained, some more ghostly creatures are thrown into the mix, and it’s suggested that the girlfriend has a secret past in which she either lost a daughter or had an abortion. I really could not figure out what was being implied.
THE TAG-ALONG 2 (2017)
Like most of these supernatural tales of ghostly girls, the sequel expands on the complexity of the back story, which is very welcome here—and the only real notable part of this overly long sequel. All the horror elements are just rehashes of the scares from the first movie, including the opening, which features the little girl in red’s hands infiltrating a guy’s face. Okay. That part never gets old.
What isn’t needed is the weird side story involving some sort of spiritual rituals in the mountains and a dude who fancies himself a tiger that sniffs out demons. It complicates the heart of the matter, which is the expansion on the themes of motherhood and guilt over giving up your child in one way or another.
We are introduced to several new female characters. First, there’s a mother who has been keeping her daughter hidden away in order to protect her from the threat of the girl in red and demon in the mountain using some sort of rituals.
There’s also a female social worker who gets drawn into the legend of the girl in red after she brings her teen daughter for an abortion, which is followed by the teen disappearing. This leads to a search team heading up the mountain to look for her. Now we learn there’s an abandoned hospital on the mountain (anything to expand that story), where they discover the main girl from the first movie acting grossly feral.
Inevitably, the three different women—original main girl, social worker, and ritual mom—join forces and head to the mountain together in hopes of finding all the missing people in their lives, getting closure on their failures as mothers, and fighting the demon and evil little baby creatures from the first movie. That’s the point where things start to feel like the Asian horror version of a melodramatic Lifetime movie.
Definitely go into this one for the enriched story details more than for a good charge of horror. You might also go into it for this pretty face. Damn.
THE TAG-ALONG: DEVIL FISH (2018)
Each new movie gets progressively longer than the movie before it, making it harder for me to remain focused and interested. Not to mention, more complex legends are introduced each time. And somehow, this installment simultaneously introduces more horror while moving farther away from the genre.
Would you believe demonic possession is unleashed by a fish this time around? Sigh. You have to know your franchise has gone off the rails when you have little kids bringing a goldfish in a clear plastic bag to get it exorcised. Right?
On top of that, the tiger legend from the previous film is more prominent, and it becomes the key to vanquishing the main demon in the mountain.
At the forefront once again is the theme of parent/child bond and separation. This time we have a sick mother and her son and a father raising his son after his wife’s death. The father also happens to be some sort of exorcist with ties to the “Master Tiger”. Ugh.
Having said that, there are several possession scenes that are quite creepy, plus a few jump scares. The girl in red makes more of a cameo this time around as other demons take center stage.
For the final act, it’s back to the mountain for more demon action, at which point the exorcist dad guy channels the Master Tiger, and this starts to feel more like a superhero movie. A fiery tiger ghost entity literally battles the bad demon for the final fight. I truly hope this is where the series dies.
