A Fish Tale That Flops Harder Than a Carp on Dry Land
Let’s be honest — there’s something inherently creepy about a fish with a human face. The blank, unblinking stare. The scaly skin. The unsettling resemblance to your boss when he asks about those “end-of-quarter numbers.” It’s nightmare fuel, tailor-made for horror.
And yet, somehow, The Tag-Along: The Devil Fish manages to take that beautifully grotesque premise and fillet it into one of the blandest, most confused supernatural soups ever simmered in Taiwanese cinema.
Directed by David Chuang, this prequel to The Tag-Along (2015) and The Tag-Along 2 (2017) promises to explore the dark origins of Taiwan’s famous “human-faced fish” legend. Instead, it feels like watching someone read folklore aloud while half-asleep — spooky words, zero tension, and all the cinematic flavor of overboiled seaweed.
The Legend: Great Story, Terrible Movie
In real life, the “human-faced fish” tale is deliciously eerie: three men grill a fish, notice a human face staring back, and hear the disembodied question, “Is the fish meat tasty?” Cue chills, folklore, and the moral lesson about greed and disrespecting the spiritual world.
In The Devil Fish, this story lasts about five minutes. It’s like being promised a meal at a seafood restaurant and instead being handed a pamphlet about food safety.
After the chilling setup, the film immediately loses interest in its own premise and veers into a chaotic mess involving temple priests, ghosts, family drama, reincarnated demons, and, for reasons only known to the screenwriters, generational trauma that would make even Freud shrug and go, “Nah, I’m out.”
There’s a kid named Chia-Hao who sees spirits, his overworked mother, a fish demon born from a murdered, fish-skinned child (no, really), and a whole lot of incense smoke. You can practically smell the confusion through the screen.
The Demon Fish: Less Scary, More Sushi
Now, if your movie’s literally named The Devil Fish, you’d expect a healthy serving of aquatic horror, right? Some slimy, nightmarish creature bursting out of the darkness, maybe a few horrifying underwater deaths?
Well, sorry — this fish barely swims.
Instead of an ancient cursed sea beast, we get a disfigured ghost boy whose dad hated him for looking like a trout. It’s tragic, sure, but not exactly terrifying. The poor kid’s backstory plays out like a dark version of The Little Mermaid, except with more parental abuse and fewer catchy songs.
When the actual fish spirit does appear, it looks like a leftover prop from a 2003 SyFy Channel movie called Shark Ghost 4: The Re-Wetkening. The CGI is so murky and underlit that you start wondering if the post-production team ran out of electricity halfway through rendering.
And the sound design? Every time the fish spirit shows up, there’s this deep, wet gurgling noise that sounds less like “ancient demon of vengeance” and more like someone blending tuna salad.
The Human Drama: Dead Fish Eyes All Around
The heart of The Devil Fish is supposed to be its emotional core — the relationship between a mother, her haunted son, and the supernatural chaos that binds them. Unfortunately, the characters are so wooden you could carve a boat out of them.
Vivian Hsu, as the mother, spends most of the movie looking like she just lost a fight with a humidifier. She cries, she gasps, she occasionally stares meaningfully into middle distance — rinse, repeat, cry again. Her performance isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s trapped inside a script that treats her less like a human being and more like a plot delivery device.
The child actor, Wu Zhi-xuan, is cute but perpetually confused, as if no one on set explained whether he’s supposed to fear the fish, befriend it, or feed it. And the temple priest characters — usually the unsung heroes of Asian horror — here feel like they wandered in from a completely different movie about fishing rights and stayed because no one yelled “cut.”
Every line of dialogue sounds like it was written by a fortune cookie possessed by a confused ghost.
The Pacing: 90 Minutes of Spiritual Narcolepsy
It’s remarkable how The Devil Fish manages to make everything happen while nothing actually happens.
The film drifts from exorcism scenes to flashbacks to dream sequences with the fluidity of a broken aquarium pump. Every 10 minutes, someone either lights incense, has a vision, or dramatically turns toward an off-screen sound effect.
It’s not suspense — it’s cardio.
There’s one sequence where the temple priest chants for what feels like half an hour while CGI smoke twirls around him like a bad screensaver. You can almost hear the production assistant muttering, “We’ll fix it in post,” while the budget evaporates.
And then there’s the ending — a muddy, apocalyptic showdown involving fire, chanting, and what might be the world’s least convincing ghost fight. It’s not scary; it’s just confusing. Imagine Ghostbusters if everyone forgot to bring their proton packs and started throwing fish oil instead.
The Atmosphere: Too Dim to Function
David Chuang clearly wanted to create a dark, moody film steeped in Taiwanese folklore. Unfortunately, he took “dark” a little too literally. Half the movie is so dimly lit that you’ll start checking your remote to see if your TV brightness broke.
Even the day scenes look overcast, like God Himself got tired of watching and dimmed the lights out of pity.
The cinematography tries for atmospheric dread — mist, shadows, ghostly reflections — but ends up looking like a music video for a funeral home.
The Soundtrack: Haunted Karaoke Machine
No East Asian horror movie is complete without eerie traditional chanting, dissonant strings, and the occasional demonic whisper. But The Devil Fish takes this to absurd levels.
Every minor plot development — from a door creaking to someone dropping a cup — is accompanied by dramatic violins that scream “SOMETHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED!” even when it didn’t.
At one point, a fish tank falls over, and the music swells like it’s the climax of Inception. I laughed so hard I nearly turned the subtitles off.
The Lore: Lost in Translation (and Logic)
What’s most disappointing is how much potential this movie wastes. Taiwanese folklore is rich, complex, and often terrifying — full of ghosts, curses, and morality tales that could fuel endless horror films.
But The Devil Fish treats its myth like background noise. The film never commits to exploring the cultural weight of the legend or the morality behind it. Instead, it hides behind vague mysticism and flashbacks that feel like deleted scenes from other movies in the Tag-Along series.
It wants to be a standalone prequel, but it plays more like a DVD bonus feature stretched into a feature film.
Final Verdict: Fillet This Fish and Start Over
The Tag-Along: The Devil Fish is the cinematic equivalent of stale sashimi — a potentially tasty idea gone bad through poor handling.
It’s overlong, underwritten, and visually murky, with scares so predictable you could set your watch by them. The filmmakers clearly love Taiwanese folklore, but they’ve made a movie that feels less like a ghost story and more like a PowerPoint presentation about one.
By the time the credits roll, you’ll be begging for someone — anyone — to ask, “Is the fish meat tasty?” just to inject some life into the scene.
Spoiler: It’s not.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 haunted carp.
Because sometimes, the real curse is realizing you spent two hours watching a fish movie that forgot to swim.
