The Eye<br></br>The Bunker<br></br>Freaks<br></br>The Devil Doll<br></br>Happy Times<br></br>Ma Femme Est Une Actrice<br></br>Divine SecretOf The Ya-Ya Sisterhood<br></br>Van Wilder: Party Liason

Horror! And not just the chick flick...

If you're still recovering from the rubbishness of Signs, then fear not: The Eye (15) is what you've been waiting for. Made by Danny and Oxide Pang, the Thai twins behind last year's hyper-stylish Bangkok Dangerous. Its protagonist is a young blind woman whose sight is restored by a cornea transplant. But the operation has side effects. She sees dead people.

The Eye is what The Sixth Sense might be if it were remade by David Fight Club Fincher and Danny Trainspotting Boyle. As in Bangkok Dangerous, the Pang brothers use every visual and sonic trick in the book, but the technical razzle-dazzle serves only to pump up the racking emotion and the spine-tingling terror. Maybe "fear not" was the wrong expression.

The Bunker (15) is another credible horror movie, one that sustains its nailbiting tension despite making do with the pocket-money budget of a British film. It's set in an anti-tank bunker, where a band of German soldiers (including Jason Flemyng and Jack Davenport) are hiding from American forces at the fag-end of the Second World War. Worn out by fear and guilt, they suspect there's something in the tunnels beneath the bunker – something even more frightening than enemy troops. But the week's must-see horror film is Freaks (12), made in 1932 by Tod Browning (and a cast of real circus "freaks") and currently on release in a double bill with The Devil-Doll (PG).

Fans of Zhang Yimou's political, historical, rural films should be warned that Happy Times (PG) is none of the above. It's a touching, comic meditation on illusion and happiness, in which a middle-aged bachelor pretends to be the manager of a grand hotel to impress his girlfriend. When the girlfriend asks him to employ her blind, teenaged stepdaughter, the web he's weaving gets much more tangled.

Ma Femme Est Une Actrice (15) could be a sequel to Notting Hill, in that it concerns an unfamous man with a movie idol wife. It's written and directed by its star, Yvan Attal, whose real-life spouse, Charlotte Gainsbourg, plays that role in the film. He's paranoid about the love scenes she's shooting in London with an English sex symbol (Terence Stamp). But Attal doesn't explore the comedy or drama of the situation. The entire story is in the title.

In Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (12), Sandra Bullock is a New York playwright whose latest Broadway show reveals how her childhood was ruined by her alcoholic, abusive mother. Mama is distraught to read about the play, so her lifelong friends (the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) drug Bullock, fly her down to Louisiana and regale her with accounts of her mother's tragic youth. Based on the novel by Rebecca Wells, this chick flick turkey prompts certain questions. Is it possible to get a comatose woman on a plane? Is there any reason why no one told Bullock about her mother's past before? And does the loss of her fiancé in the War excuse the mother's spitefulness? The answers are no, no and no.

Van Wilder: Party Liaison (15) tries and fails to wring laughs from incontinence, goitres and canine semen, not forgetting those comedy stand-bys, fat people, gay people, deaf people, foreign people and women.

n.barber@independent.co.uk