A few years back, just as the current wave of Vietnamese film was begin to draw attention around the glob, one of the first to make a splash was Spirits, a ghost story by Victor Vu. Like many of the driving forces behind this wave, Vu grew up in America - not Vietnam - but has returned to his cultural home in his professional life.
Spirits won a lot of praise on the festival circuit and would soon be followed by successful romcom Passport To Love. And now, with his latest picture, Vu is back into genre territory with the slick thriller Inferno. Here's the official synopsis:
Spirits won a lot of praise on the festival circuit and would soon be followed by successful romcom Passport To Love. And now, with his latest picture, Vu is back into genre territory with the slick thriller Inferno. Here's the official synopsis:
Check the official trailer below!SAIGON, DISTRICT 7. Heavy rain falls from the dark sky. A car speeds across an intersection and loses control, smashing into a delivery truck. The car flips through the air and explodes in flames. The man in the car is severely burned - his face completely disfigured. To make matters worse, he suffers from amnesia and cannot remember anything before the accident.
The man wakes up several weeks later in the hospital and learns that he is MANH, a wealthy real estate tycoon with connections with politicians as well as the underground world. Later, he knows he has a beautiful wife named Trang and a man who is assumed to be his best friend named Bao. He also knows that he has business relationship with a son of a powerful mafia family named Hung. And .... there is a mysterious young girl who always follow him with strange messages.
Manh finds that he is in a mysterious journey through the connections with various characters. As the stories told by them, the secrets of his life are gradually revealed. PAST & PRESENT connects...
In the effort to get his memories and piercing his broken life back together, the ugly truths behind his true face and the secrets from the accident come to light....
How do I turn off these "At Amazon" and "At Mubi" turds?
Well Victor Vu cannot hide forever. He has to face the shameful inferno of his own dishonesty. The truth exploded out all over the Vietnamese press that Victor Vu copied the entire film "Shattered" in making "his film" Inferno. It came out that he did not just copy the story or a few things, Victor Vu duplicated everything from the main story to sub stories to main and supporting characters to each twist in Shattered and its ending. Victor even copied Shattered's look and music, sounds etc. He is now seen as a big shame of Vietnamese Cinema, just google "Victor Vu Inferno giong y het Shattered" (Victor Vu's Inferno is a duplicate of Shattered). Victor Vu has have shamed himself and unfortunately the entire Vietnamese Cinema and the image of the Vietnamese people as copycats, because of his shameful dishonesty.
Frankly the first thing I thought when reading this synopsis was: Hey, a "Shattered" remake!
Still, that in itself doesn't need to be bad. I liked "Shattered' a lot but I can see the allure of other people playing around with its concept.
It is very dishonest and shameful in the case of Victor Vu, he copied "Shattered" to make his "Inferno" then bragged in the press that it was all his own creativity and how great he is... That's not remake, that's called stealing! it's blatant theft! He wanted fame by stealing other people's work. A remake is when the filmmakers buy the copyright and readily admit that they will be doing a remake. In Victor Vu's case he stole "Shattered" then bragged that it was his own work and how great he is. Even after he was found out and confronted he and his producer Irene Trịnh still lied to the Vietnam press that they "never saw Shattered before" and said Vietnamese people know nothing! They said they do "Hollywood" so two Hollywood films have to be the same it's "a normal coincidence and unavoidable in Hollywood". Victor Vu and Irene Trịnh are liars and still lying. Go see both films you'll see their lies.
Victor Vu not just plagiarized but photo-copied Shattered. Look at his history, Victor Vu's film "Chuyen Tinh Xa Xu" in Dec 2009 was an amateur film which came out in Vietnam to terrible audience and press reviews then less than a year later he came out in Vietnam with Inferno (Vietnamese title Giao lo dinh menh) which suddenly had a good story and got great reviews. At the time no one questioned how he transformed overnight from such a bad director to such a great screenwriter and director, until the truth came out in the newspapers that Victor Vu's film Inferno was identical to Shattered in every aspect from story to execution. Victor Vu obviously follows the "lie, lie, lie your way out" escape route and had been repeating over and over to the Vietnamese press that Vietnamese people know nothing about film, he keeps saying that he's "a Hollywood-style director so it is normal and unavoidable" that his film is identical to another Hollywood film. Let's see if he dare repeat that to a foreign film critic, Victor Vu's Inferno is an identical copy of Shattered not just merely similar! Stealing Shattered and bragged that it was all own creation showed Victor Vu is a thief and liar but worse is his willingness to dismiss Vietnamese people with lies it shows he has no self-respect or any integrity or regard to the Vietnamese except his own goal of fake fame at all cost.
It's so sad that some bad Vietnamese Americans use what they know in the US to go back to Vietnam to prey on fellow Vietnamese people. Victor Vu and Irene Trinh carefully picked Shattered from 1991 to copy cause they knew in 1991 Vietnam was shut to the outside so no one in VN ever saw Shattered. They launched their copycat Inferno giao lo dinh menh bragging they were "Hitchcock" and so on, but a few weeks later they were caught as plagiarisers so I guess they underestimated Vietnamese people.
Victor Vu is also a disappointment and a discredit to his alma mater Loyola Marymount University. Loyola certainly did not teach filmmaking for its student to go back to his home country and cheat its people.
I laughed out loud when I saw both films. In Inferno Victor Vu copied not only the story from Shattered but he had the same characters with same profession working in the same business doing the same actions holding same props speaking the same dialogue in the same location as in Shattered! And he shot it the same way and had actors do the same acting with same facial expression. Laughed so hard at this impostor Victor Vu's farcical extreme plagiarism, sorry but this guy proves Vietnamese copy and steal from others.
Vietnam being isolated from the outside world in the early 90s was opportunity for Victor Vu's fraud to plagiarize Hollywood movies from that period to exploit vietnamese investors and people of today, Victor Vu gets both money and fame just by copying other people's work. Easy, just requires lack of conscience.
I think film directors got to have creativity, integrity and responsibility. By copying wholesale Wolfgang Petersen's Shattered Victor Vu showed he has no creativity, by using plagiarized work to brag to Vietnamese that he's Hitchcock in Hollywood Victor Vu showed he has no integrity, and by holding press conferences in Vietnam to tell more lies like "everybody in Hollywood knows making identical movies is no problem but Vietnamese can't understand Hollywood things", Victor Vu showed he has no responsibility.
I can't believe after having done a scene for scene, detail by detail plagiarism of Shattered like that Victor Vu can still continue to call press conferences in Vietnam "exlaining" to vietnamese people that "the similarities are merely coincidences". Vietnamese people are so easily exploited by Victor Vu, anywhere else this would sound like a comedy, a farce. I guess Victor Vu is a seasoned plagiarizer he knows how to play his victims.
This story certainly does seem to have legs.
Why I read the same comments regarding this topic in different articles from different websites????? Who are these people trying to post the same thing over and over again from many places on the internet???? What are their purposes????
I got curious about Victor Vu stealing Shattered and searched around the internet for reader's comments. Unbelievably, there are a number of people posted the same comments from ANY articles or website mentioning about Inferno. Must be something going on here. What are their purposes?????
Hey Mike / CaliforniaAsianSurferGirl / nguyendungcq / jazzplayer9 / dandragon79, you know what else is "dishonest and shameful"? Adopting a series of fake IDs to conduct a smear campaign against someone while trying to appear to be more than one person. Which you're not. IP addresses are wonderful things and yours tells me that you are all the same person. Given that Johnny is just a couple digits off, he probably is, too.
This is all just one person with a grudge mouthing off. Nothing more.
Hmmm, I'm not sure you can make that assumption in Vietnam, Vietnam is a big coffee culture where groups of friends hang out together all day long at these cafes with loud music and free wifi and they play games or chat or surf net all day together, that's how young people (or anyone) get their internet free of charge and hang out with their group of buddies all day long for the price of one coffee (very cool), and everyone have the same IP address because they all use the cafe's wifi. Anyway one thing I'm sure is this thing was a big scandal in Vietnam so definitely it's not one person, search for it in Vietnamese language news websites and forums, it's all over. Now I'm sorry I didn't go see it when it was showing. But apart from all this Vietnam is a very lovely place with lovely people.
Vietnam is one giant intranet for its 28+ million internet users. There are only 5 gateways to the international backbone being shared by a dozen government run ISPs. That's the reason why so many VN users have identical or similar (external) IP addresses.