Project Hashima (ฮาชิมะ โปรเจกต์) (2013)

A bunch of ill-fated unemployed Thai youngsters struggling for their first big break take an assignment to shoot an episode for a trashy horror-travel programme and end up getting spooked to within an inch of their lives.

The Billionaire (Top Secret: วัยรุ่นพันล้าน) (2011)

This biopic of a self-made billionaire chronicles his transformation from a penny-wise, pound-foolish teen entrepreneur to the head of an actually successful big venture.

This film plays like a business school textbook where the entrepreneur protagonist makes every blunder in the book.

You'll get your kicks from watching him slip up in one financial misadventure after another until he somehow gets it all right.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 8 February 2012.

Suckseed (ห่วยขั้นเทพ) (2011)

Scrappy highschool underdogs with no musical sense form rock band and struggle to succeed.

It's like That Thing You Do!, Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, and This is Spinal Tap all rolled into one.

Suckseed is a typical Japanese band film executed in the bold and demented visual style of the Thai New Wave.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 17 August 2011.

Brown Sugar (น้ำตาลแดง) (2010)

This erotic anthology is to Bangkok what Paris Je'taime is to Paris.

Bangkok here is a sensual city whose inhabitants fall under its spell, succumbing to the multitudinous aspects of love. Old love, new love...

Sadly, the shorts are very hit and miss. It is the final poignant short, a beautiful meditation on loneliness and alienation, that truly deserves the stamp of arthouse erotica.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 13 July 2011.

Four (หลุดสี่หลุด) (2011)

Four jaded Thai horror directors come together to make a very old school horror compendium.

The shorts may remind you of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episodes.

That's how stripped down to the basics of horror storytelling this film goes. Don't bother if you want to see gore, special effects, and prosthetics.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 6 July 2011.

Laddaland (ลัดดาแลนด์) (2011)

Technically a haunted house flick, Laddaland subverts Hollywood horror convention by reversing the relationship between horror and middle class suburban angst.

It's a horror flick where the social allegory for the horrors of capitalism and indebtness is more interesting and potentially scarier than the scares delivered on screen.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 8 June 2011.

My Best Bodyguard (มาย เบสท์ บอดี้การ์ด) (2010)

You can indeed watch My Best Bodyguard as a modern zombie flick even if it has no zombies.

It does have all the typical tropes of the zombie flick, from xenophobia, political paranoia, corporate greed, military stupidity, bureaucratic paralysis, and cold-blooded bureaucratic utilitarianism.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 6 April 2011.

Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives (ลุงบุญมีร:ะลึกชาติ) (2010)

A man dying from a terminal illness begins to see visions of past lives while being visited by ghosts and monsters.

Those who aren't familiar with Thai culture and politics may watch this as a quirky and meandering Magic Realist drama.

Those familiar with Thai culture and politics will recognise an aggressively irreverent screed against the various elites of Thai society.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 26 January 2011.

9 temples (9 วัด) (2010)

In The Amazing Race of Thai horror film, our protagonists must visit 9 temples over a weekend in order to thwart a karmic curse.

Despite the comic potential of this premise, the film isn't played for laughs.

You may however appreciate the beautiful cinematography of director Saranyoo Jirelak, sometimes assistant director to the much more famous Wisit Sasanatieng (Tears of the black tiger, Citizen dog).


Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 30 June 2010.

My Ex (แฟนเก่า) (2009)

You'd heard of the ex from hell, but Ken is about to meet THE ex from HELL!

Will Thai horror survive the director's decision to ditch all the storytelling innovations of the previous decade?

Will this be scary enough for modern audiences?

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 27 January 2010.

Son of the Northeast, ลูกอีสาน (1982) (SIFF 2009)

The anxiety of influence

Ostensibly, Son of the Northeast is a historical drama set in the 1930s Thailand, in its Isan (Northeast) province, telling the travails of a small clan of subsistence farmers and their village as a particularly bad drought reduces them to bush living.

I suppose one could enjoy this movie on a literal level, which is encouraged by director Vichit Kounavudhi's moving, documentary-like presentation of this work of fiction. The story plays out like a Thai version of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (পথের পাঁচালী), but like many other films, history has caught up with Son of the Northeast, and we can no longer watch it with naive eyes.

I'm referring to the unfolding political turmoil in Thailand, where the source of the troubles hail from its Northeast province and its turbulent denizens - the only beneficiaries of the otherwise questionable reign of Thaksin Shinawatra, and understandably the only parties angry enough to derail the post-Thaksin political process.

And I'm also referring to the fact that the Northeast province has historically been troublesome for Bangkok: the last territory to be incorporated (or annexed) into the Kingdom during its final stage of expansion just prior to the 20th century, its culture, language, and people are more Lao and Cambodian than Thai, and politically rebellious. That the province was renamed "The Northeast" at the beginning of 20th century is a hint at the Bangkok's simultaneous nation-building agenda and anxiety of influence, under which the film actually operates.

While this story is set in the 1930s, the director behind the camera and the author holding the pen are strictly creatures of the 1980s, an era where Bangkok was already casting its nervous to the Northeast.

The nation-building message and its corresponding anxiety over Isan in the film becomes more apparent and unsubtle through time: the villagers (coded as Thai) are set against their ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian neighbours (coded as foreigners), who fight a cold war between themselves. The villagers are entranced by a gramophone playing a nationalist song praising the monarch and the unity of the Thai state. They happily send their children to Buddhist temples that double up as schools for the Thai language - a function that came only with the region's annexation by Thailand. And best yet, they call themselves Northeasterners.

With that heavy a burden of historical revisionism and nation-building, it is no surprise then that the film does not end up being the Thai Pather Panchali. As a straightforward documentary-like drama, the film is more than watchable in its recreation of rich ethnographic detail of early 20th century life in Isan, but far more can be gleamed if one is aware of the political anxieties expressed inadvertently in this work.

13 Beloved (13 เกมสยอง) (2007)

Deal or no deal?

Released everywhere else under the title of 13 Beloved, this Thai psychological thriller comes to Singapore as 13 Game of Death, probably because the distributors thought Singaporean moviegoers need less subtle movie titles to flock to cinemas. Don't be mistaken, though - this is not an action movie; you won't see Bruce Lee; and you shouldn't expect to see any character in a yellow tracksuit running about here. Instead, it would be helpful to think of this movie as the Thai version of The Game, and more useful, in fact, to realise that it's just about as decently made and conceptualised as a commercial Thai movie can get.

The setup, allowing for certain updates and cultural changes, is the same as The Game: it's a psychological thriller with Krissada Kukosol in the Michael Douglas role, willingly participating in a mysterious game even though he's not too aware of its details. And like The Game, central character Puchit finds himself forced to complete tasks that often find him reenacting unpleasant memories from his childhood and troubled relationship with his father, with each task regressing him further into either pure childhood Id or into pure animalism.

You might be thinking now - why watch this if you've already watched Michael Douglas get his mind toyed with so brilliantly in The Game? For one, I think director Sakveerakul and author Thairaat have tried their fair share of updating the concept of The Game for modern audiences - think of it as a highly secretive reality game show staged for the benefit of persons unknown.

So perhaps you would be wondering instead - have the director and author enough planned out for the 13 labours of Putchit? Perhaps realising that having 13 traumatic memories for their hero would be too much of a stretch, the team decides to mix several things in - which creates an at times incoherent product that doesn't quite mesh at all. Half of the trials may be about toying with Putchit's childhood memories, but the other half is just plain exploitation film, where for some reason, Putchit gets to beat up beggars, teenage delinquent gangsters, abusive rock singer boyfriends, and bikers. I'm sure this is a failed attempt at social commentary - recognisably social problems are raised without the director/writer asking the right questions, giving real answers, or even just riffing along or even minimally recognising that they've moved on to the Blackburn or Falling Down style revanchist satire.

The slightly better attempts at social commentary may not be all that noticeable if audiences aren't clued in about the specifically Thai culture of conspicuous consumption and ostentatious spending beyond one's means, the dynamics of typical lower class families, and so on. However, some of the social commentary can get out of hand, resulting in the morally smug tone of amateur Singaporean short films, with their over the top, overemotionalised focus on the plight of the old, the unravelling of family ties, and the generation gap. Yet, before you know it, there's a huge hamfisted denouncement of Thai society and the hypocrisy of the average citizen in the form of a speech.

I imagine this film being remade under the far more capable hands of Park Chan-wook, or being far more focused and tight if its editor had tried harder to rein in the meanderings of the director and writer. At 13 trials, it seems that both director and writer lost focus of their essence of their story and got too easily sidetracked, barking up the wrong trees at times.

That being said, I believe that 13 Beloved is still the most decently conceptualised and produced Thai thriller to hit our screens this year, and is very much worth watching, especially for crowds tired of the Western gore-slasher-horror genre.

First published at incinemas on 28 June 2007

Passion, The อำมหิตพิศวาส (2006)

This movie is brought to you by the letters O M G W T F B B Q!!!

There's an apocryphal saying, sometimes attributed to French New Wave/nouvelle vague director Francois Truffaut, that goes "There is no such thing as a bad film, only a badly-made film". Clearly whoever said this must've had The Passion in mind. Previously in the past year, I thought that I have seen the worst movie in Thai cinema, but couldn't decide if the movie was called Colic or Ghost Game. Today, I would like to retract my earlier statements: The Passion is by far the worst movie in Thai cinema, not because of any immature handling of premise or bad taste, but solely because it is so badly made that you will be sorely tempted to hurl fistfuls of popcorn and rotting fruit and vegetables at the screen while watching this movie.

Here's the lowdown: The Passion is an exploitation movie set almost entirely in a shopping mall and cineplex that's run by corrupt and depraved security staff. The security chief is played by the director of this movie, and as such, he gets to molest, rape, and punch every other female appearing in this movie, while blackmailing his boss (who'd like a moral cleansing of the corrupt cineplex system - such an idea is so... farfetched it's brilliant) for a payout of 250 million baht. But this is the security chief's unlucky day - due to the tensions between the staff of the mall, the delivery of the blackmail money goes wrong, and worse still, his latest victim happens to be a psychologically disturbed girl with a huge knife in her bag... Will the corrupt chief continue his reign of terror, with the help of his hidden network of CCTV cameras throughout the mall, or will the innocent victims walk free?

Now, this does sound like the premise for either a gripping thriller or an allegory on the depraved state of Thai film industry and the trash that gets produced and lapped up at box office record levels by audiences, and then distributed in Singapore as "Smash Thai hit of 2006!" That's why I entered the cinema. But almost from the word go, it became apparent that this isn't the film I would be watching. For one, it looks as if the film was shot by secondary school students who snuck into the mall one night at 2am and rushed to complete their shoot by sunrise. You know, the "smart" idea to film chase scenes all over the mall and cineplex, in its hallways, back alleys, carpark, kitchen, rubbish dump, and even storage rooms. Sure, it's a smart idea, but only if it wasn't so incompetently done.

Here's a quick rundown of the horrendous stuff that first-time director Sarangyoo Wongkrachang offers us, from the first 40 minutes of the movie:

The editing (please thank Mahasak Dhasnapayak!) is completely botched up. It's as though Dasanapayak never realised it's bad cinematography to cross-cut between scenes, shift camera angles, jump cut between 4 different chase scenes and different plot lines every 3 seconds. Do congratulate Dhasnapayak for making a bigger mess out of what is already an incoherent script...

Apparently, Director of Photography Suthot Ruengui can't hold a camera without at least half of every take ending up out of focus. We hope he'll use an automatic camera next time. Both Ruengui and Dhasnapayak also form a tag-team, collaborating to give us shots where actors standing in front of a light have an unearthly glowing outline around their bodies. Also, Ruengui and director Wongkrachang have this special move, where every time the camera angle shifts from one character POV to another, the camera distance is set too far off...

Director Wangkrachang continues his spatial cluelessness by having a character on the second floor with a camera take footage of a murder on the top floor, even though his camera is aiming straight and not up...

Sayun Somkourn and Anusorn Pinyopojanee, the art directors, should be commended for finding a prop that looks like a charred and completely burnt for hours human body. The only thing is... they used the prop for a character who was doused with normal cooking oil, set on fire for 10 seconds, and then put out with a convenient bucket of water...

Scriptwriter Chatrisa Srisantiwong should be commended as well for the rather incoherent (but not incompetent to the point of surrealism) script, which allows a man to rise up, slap, punch and body throw a woman after she plunges a drill into his chest. That and having the Last Girl creep up to surprise the security chief in his office, even though he has hidden cameras all over the mall's corridors. That and having the Last Girl hide in a water slide from a security goon, despite the fact that everyone could hear the water splashing all over her, and the fact that the goon would have just spotted her by standing up straight because the slide is below chest level.

Whoever was in charge of continuity and simple logic on the set should also be commended: the blouse on a dead girl alternates between buttoned up and undone depending on which scene you're watching, even though no one has moved the body. There's also a weird ventilator fan death a la Daylight, except that the body is sliced into half on the first turn of the fan... and everyone knows that fans only pick up speed on rotation after a few turns...

And finally, here's a tip to the director: if you're going to make a thriller with a twist at the end, it only works if the rest of the movie is coherent, makes sense, and is free of glaring errors.

The Passion is one of those rare films where anything that can go wrong in production does go wrong. I would recommend it highly for aspiring filmmakers, media students, and film lecturers as an excellent and highly entertaining (You'll groan at the movie so much that you 'll start giggling!) educational tool, but the rest of us normal folks would benefit from staying away from this bad movie, which somehow won a Thai movie award. I leave you to ponder over how that can happen.

First published at incinemas on 3 May 2007

Cadaver ศพ (2006)

Med school never looked so hilarious before

I'm convinced that Cadaver must be a horror comedy. You see, it's set in med school, where students have to learn how to dissect cadavers. Let's face it: if you get squeamish about the blood - or worse, if you're like the female protagonist of this movie, you think that the cadavers are haunting you - I'm pretty sure the dean will just transfer you out or get you expelled from med school. Here, though, the dean and vice-dean just counsel the poor girl while she turns up in school every morning with increasingly puffy panda eyes (yes, for some reason the cadavers haunt the girl at home, in the night) to scream or faint from a perceived ghoulish attack. It gets pretty hilarious thereafter: in a key scene, the dean demands to know why the girl is so superstitious about handling cadavers and having hallucinations about ghosts, but you realise he can't be asking a serious question because the shrouded cadavers in this med school arrive wrapped in garlands and remain wrapped in garlands even in the dissecting studio. I mean, it has to be a bit of a joke, right? The med school is apparently full of students, but its corridors are empty in all but one scene in the movie.

Sadly, though, this is yet another top-grossing horror movies of 2006 in Thailand, leading me to suspect that audiences go to cinemas to have a brainless time. I hesitate to say that these movies are entertaining per se: the spate of Thai horror films of the past year are just plain awful (a Thai film last year used clanging cymbals and wayang kulit music to invoke horror), plain stupid (a twist ending in another film revealed out of nowhere that the ghosts were haunting a baby because it killed student protestors in another life!?), or annoyingly offensive (ghost stories set in a former Cambodian torture camp, anyone?). Ergo, the horror movie genre of late in Thailand is solely for the taste of local audiences who don't mind badly-conceptualised, half-baked narratives as long as they provide the obligatory loud noises, people in green, grey, or white makeup, and jingly jangly wayang kulit music.

I'm not even going to try to go into the mind of Singaporean audiences who'd want to watch these horror movies because they were the box-office heavyweights in Thailand, so I'll just mention stuff that will strike the minds of ordinary moviegoers when they watch Cadaver.

Sight and sound
It's not bad, Cadaver does take a step forward for Thai horror film. The director here seems to figure out that wayang kulit music and clashing cymbals does not make people feel scared, and follows the Hollywood trend of basing the horror movie on sudden, loud noises that will be amplified a thousand-fold by the cinema speakers. Visually, Cadaver indicates that Thai directors have still not outgrown the peak-a-boo kabuki ghosts that they imported from Japan, and are beginning to import the 70s Hollywood shower horror scenes, but perhaps the most horrifying detail about this film is how unscary the ghoul looks - you'll jump out of your seat only because of the loud sound effects.

Story
As mentioned, the premise is just incompetent, but I'm willing to overlook that just because Cadaver does not have a silly twist ending. It seems the director does have a head on his shoulders, wisely avoiding how other directors sink their already mediocre horror movies. I applaud the director in shifting the twist from the last 5 minutes of the movie to the end of the second act. If done well, the first act becomes a standard collection of pointless scare tactics that build up to an unexpectedly richer story in the second and third acts. In Cadaver though, the twist just turns the first act into incomprehensible nonsense, the second into an overlong and tedious buildup, and the final act into an anti-climax that lacks any real surprises.

It's very hard to take Cadaver and its ilk seriously at all, and it's very difficult to be frightened by their offerings. However, if Cadaver is any indication at all, Thai horror films could well turn out to be genuinely scary... in about 10 years' time.

First published at incinemas on 19 April 2007

Spirit of the Victim ผีคนเป็น (2006)

If the poster looks horrible, don't expect the film to be good?

I remember this film when it was called Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. You know, the movie where a bunch of people making a horror film about Freddy are in fact haunted, hunted, and gutted by the cinematic villain when the cameras stop rolling. The Thai horror industry has definitely come of age when it takes on the horror movie within a horror movie treatment of the last great American horror film and puts on a Thai spin, and ups the ante. Even if the results are mixed (a sign that the filmmakers are challenging themselves), it’s interesting to watch this, admire the concept, and think of how perfect it would be without its flaws.

Now, the horror movie within the horror-movie has Ting (Pitchanart Sakakorn), a mediocre but persistent bit-part actress whose skills nevertheless gain the attention of a local cop who needs someone to play all the female victims in his Crimewatch-style television series. While reenacting all the scenes of murders, it seems the ghosts and spirits of the grievously departed are drawn towards Ting, and the supernatural hauntings of her and her crew really begin in earnest when the Thai Crimewatch plans to film a case involving a traditional dancer turned model. Of course, Ting isn’t really Ting, but an actress playing Ting in a movie, and the ghosts and hauntings of the Crimewatch crew aren’t really ghosts... but it turns out that the actress portraying Ting and her crew are really haunted by ghosts...

Like I said, this makes for one of the best horror movie premises ever, but unlike Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the translation of the idea to a screenplay seems to have suffered, and then injured again in the execution of screenplay to film. When you’re making a double horror movie, the last thing you should do is to spend too much time on the movie within the movie, then reveal that everything that the audience has watched up to that point isn’t the real story at all. That’s what Wes Craven’s New Nightmare deftly avoids. That’s what Method (one of Elizabeth Hurley’s worst films) also avoids, by running both films at the same go, like a reality show. And by intercutting between the movie-within-a-movie and the “real story”, both Method and New Nightmare actually come off as narratively complex and delightfully dense.

With Spirit of the Victim, the story is forced to reboot itself and cast away any reserve of goodwill it builds in the audience. Better yet, because the director and producers know they’re coming about against Wes Craven’s movie, they inject more reboots along the way – the ghost haunting the crew isn’t the real ghost, their story isn’t the real story, and several haunting sequences are actually bad dreams. Done right, it could actually trip you out and spark off some reflections on the shaky foundations of reality. As it stands, the execution of Spirit of the Victim will just make you stop caring about the characters and then stop letting yourself get scared by its fright scenes. Plotwise, the film lacks a unity and economy of purpose that is very crucial for any entry in this movie-within-movie genre to succeed.

Oddly enough, the fright scenes (very polished CGI and setup reminiscent of those in a Pang Brothers spookfest) and even the plot of the movie-within-the-movie are far more entertaining and inspired than those in the ‘real story’ itself – which consist of ghouls dressed up as traditional dancers (in all their headgear and wayang-like poses) creeping up towards their victims while the gongs and cymbal bang increasingly louder. Not that the fright mood music was any better in the movie-within-the-movie: the ‘scary music’ was so blatant loud it made scary scenes lose their impact, and non-scary scenes look comical. Yes, we regret to inform you, the sophisticated horror fan, that the Thais still can’t get the music right.

I can’t say I liked Spirit of the Victim when its horror sequences got more and more banal and less and less creative the more the director reveals the “real story”. What I can say is I like the director for challenging himself with such a convoluted and interesting premise, even though he does fall short of achieving the potential the movie had within it.

First published at incinemas on 4 January 2007

Colic เด็กเห็นผ (2006)

Even Junior knows this movie should be pulped, juiced, and tossed out

Perhaps we have Thaksin to thank for Thailand’s economic boom in the recent years. With the frequent pump-priming of the Thai economy, it was inevitable that the film industry would find a way to get its hands on the excess liquidity circulating in the country. This is my way of saying that perhaps we have Thaksin to blame for the avalanche of ill-conceived Thai horror films in our cinemas, often as a part of an international trilogy (Three, Black Night), or as stupidly offensive and disrespectful movies that have caused diplomatic incidents and complaints from foreign ambassadors (Ghost Game, Lucky Losers). For the uninitiated, it’s like making an Auschwitz Holocaust Zombie Chainsaw Massacre or a soccer movie calling the Malaysians the worst football team in the world. Meanwhile, groundbreaking and superior storytellers like Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Invisible Waves, Last Life in the Universe) and Wisit Sasanatieng (Citizen Dog) are forced to sit out the "Thai film revival" in their day jobs with advertising agencies because Thai audiences prefer cheap horror movies and comedies – even if they are badly made. I weep for Thai audiences, the two great young directors of Thai film, and for Singaporean audiences, who are subjected to imported Thai box-office hits that lack the quality to justify a cinema outing to overseas audiences.

This is, of course, a roundabout way of saying that Colic is one of those films. A less direct way would be to mention that Patchanon Thumjira is a first time director whose previous experience in the film industry consisted of designing posters and trailers for local films. He has one bright idea that might serve as an interesting premise for a horror film: babies with colic (a disorder marked by incessant crying) behave that way because they are tormented by apparitions and spirits they have sinned against in their previous life. One could imagine that if the film industry had no access to easy funds, or if Thai audiences were more discriminating, the director would have taken more time and enough to write a better script, edit his movie more professionally, or just thought through the idea more thoroughly.

What you get, then, is a horror movie that is badly mis-timed, where sound cues (you know, spooky music, lots of gamelans, shrieky synths...) do not match what you see on the screen. You will, like me, feel like running out of the cinema (not in horror, but in despair!) by the first half hour, where static shots are accompanied by the horror music cues that seem to suggest something IS happening when you know nothing is happening; horror music cues come in seconds after a fake scare has been executed, and the music cue lingers unbearably after the scare has been revealed as a fake. You will scratch your head over an infamous dream sequence that gave the movie its poster – although effective, it has nothing to do with the theme of the horror movie you are watching.

You will want to run out of the cinema when you realise that the movie has so many loose ends and side-plots that pop out of nowhere and disappear into nowhere just as quickly. Case in point: cursed baby’s mother receives a phone call from a mysterious lady for hubby when he is (supposedly) out doing overtime work. The phone call and the lady are never mentioned again, even though clearly the couple are supposed to be estranged due to the stress of baby’s condition. And of course, the couple are estranged one minute and fine the next. Someone clearly threw out a huge portion of film stock on the editing room floor and forgot to tidy the mess or do a clean job of the pruning.

More evidence of either a butchered film or a poorly written film: Baby’s mom proclaims that every time baby breaks out into a crying spell, he saves the family from a disaster. That clearly isn’t shown in the movie - at that point, parents and caregivers see strange apparitions whenever baby cries. People DIE whenever baby cries.

And what is Thai cinema without its strange insistence on stupidly offending people across the board? If you believe the director, babies with colic may end up retarded and autistic, and have to be interned in a mental institution and put in straitjackets. I vote for the director, his scriptwriter, editor, and the producers of this movie to be put in straitjackets and detained in mental institutions for their worse than amateurish effort to produce a horror film.

First published at incinemas on 16 November 2006

Ghost Game ล่า-ท้า-ผ (2006)

This movie bombed at the Thai box office, was pulled out after a 3-week run, sparked off protests in Cambodia and caused a diplomatic incident. Watch it now!

The cast of Academy Fantasia (a popular Thai reality show about aspiring actors) star in Ghost Game, a horror movie about a paranormal Fear Factor type reality show where contestants are apparently taken to creepy locations to rough it out, and the last one to be spooked out wins. Imagine what would happen if the contestants were brought to a really haunted prison camp formerly run by a bloodthirsty commander.

That’s an interesting enough premise, but something has gone very wrong. I’m guessing it might have something to do with letting a first-time director helm this film, or the fact that this is the very first film from this production company. I wouldn’t be surprised if the producers are rookies as well – that would fit in just nicely with the amateur acting cast of Academy Fantasia.

The reality game horror movie is something that hasn’t been fully tested, aside from a mild flirtation in Halloween: Resurrection. While reviewers complained its director was underinformed about the very plot device he used to update the Halloween series, it is clear that Sarawuth Wichiensan has even less of a clue about reality television than he has of horror movies.

Here is my list of cinematic crimes that Sarawuth Wichiensan is guilty of:

1. For a reality show set on a sizeable island, where are the crew with handheld cameras tagging along each of the 11 contestants for almost all their waking and sleeping hours? How do we see what happens in the film if there are no camera crew around to film the footage?

It’s rather bizarre since we do know that the CCTV-style cameras on the ceilings of the rooms and corridors in the former prison camp are incapable of broadcast quality footage and not to mention are incapable of shooting close-up angles or even moving about. Yet at times, parts of Ghost Game look as though they are shot in hand-held, and we know there are no on-site camera crew in those scenes. What gives?

2. Sarawuth Wichiensan has this rather cute impression that a reality show that follows the movements of 11 contestants over a few days can be aired live on television at apparently all times of the day in Bangkok. In real life, reality shows are filmed on location, then edited at a studio, and broadcast on television months later.

That this ill-conceived notion went uncorrected is quite a feat when you realise that at least 11 people on the set just went through a reality TV show, and would know much more than the director on the topic.

3. Can someone tell me why there are tonnes of screeching violins and assorted horror movie sound effects when the horror movie is about what takes place during the actual shoot of a reality TV show?

Either the Ghost Game takes place in supposedly “real life” and “real time” – in which case there should not be any non-diegetic music – or the Ghost Game is a partial parody of reality shows, in which case the director should play up the music, using cheesy Survivor tribal council style theme and the Tribal Challenge theme, and arrange to bump off the annoying characters in style, accompanied by more cheesy music of the non-horror kind.

4. Perhaps the greatest crime is this: at the beginning of Ghost Game, footage is shown of a previous camera crew mysteriously dying of extreme shock at the same site. At the end of Ghost Game, when the killings begin, the contestants and crew do not die in the same manner, despite the fact that they encounter the same forces that killed of the previous crew.

5. A horror movie is simply not worth watching if it breaks its own rules. Or if the makeup for the ghosts is so amateurish and half-baked that it reminds you of your secondary school drama night event.

Ghost Game is a horror movie so poorly conceived and far worse executed that the only horror you can experience comes with the realisation that you paid money to watch it. It is incompetently made, yet unlike the glorious trash of Ed Wood, it lacks creativity or even entertainment value. Yet there is one way to get me watching this movie again, and to pay good money too: some enterprising television network should get the rights to do an Asian version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and screen this with a running commentary by sock puppets making fun of every bad line, scene, and concept in the movie.

First published at incinemas on 17 August 2006

The Tiger Blade (2005)

Tiger Blade is Thailand’s answer to Mission: Impossible

Like horror movies, your response to The Tiger Blade will be in the danger zone should you watch this flick alone in the cinema. Instead, grab your friends for the movie outing, because its trashiness can only be properly appreciated in a large giggling crowd.

The bare basics of the plot – and they remain at the bare basics even as the movie plays out – involve the events following a prison break by a former guerrilla army commander. Fighting for the independence of his subjugated ethnic nation in neighbouring Burma, the commander teams up with government turncoats, crooked politicians, psychotic gangsters, and a bullet-proof crime lord to pull off the biggest heist in Thailand. Trying to foil his plans is super agent Yos (Atsadawut Luengsuntorn), his leading lady Dao (Phimonrat Phisarayabud) and team-mates from his high tech, top secret special agency.

Since the crime lord and his entire gang are fitted with mystical tattoos and headbands conferring immunity to firearms (surely the Boxer Rebellion people should sue for copyright infringement here?), and even though this is an action movie, Yos decides not to fight hand-to-hand with them, but wastes half an hour of the movie trying to obtain the mystical “Metal Talisman Sword”. This rusty sword may or may not be the Tiger Blade of the title. Due to the deliciously bad subtitling, I had the impression that Tiger Blade is the nickname of super agent Yos. But back to the story. the Tiger Blade makes all of 3 short appearances in the movie, 2 of them anti-climatic, truncated, and unimpressive fights occurring in the middle of the film instead of the final fight scenes.

That’s not to say The Tiger Blade isn’t a good action movie. The movie feels as though director Siripanwaraporn drafted the fight sequences first, then wrote the script around them. As a result, you will feel that there are fights and street or road chases every 5 minutes. You might want to bring a stopwatch to time this, and win some bets with your friends (that’s why I suggested bringing them along).

My biggest annoyance with the fight scenes are the obvious toning down and self-censorship – despite the liberal use of guns, bombs and knives, there is not a single drop of blood on screen. Since the film is already rated M18 due to a sexual assault scene, I demand blood, gore, and decapitations! The fights are choreographed nicely, but one has the urge to scream at the director to hire better stuntwomen for the fight scenes. Or at least cough up money to get Tony Jaa into a wig to perform the fight sequences for the female characters. The chase sequences were serviceable, but I had the impression one of them was a re-creation of the Bangkok street chase from Ong Bak, shot for shot.

The cast is a little wooden, but more than sufficient for the demands of the B-movie script. Yos’s elite team comes across as mostly one-note characters whose deficiency is all the more pronounced outside the fight scenes. The sole exception is Annan Bunnak as the devastatingly witty and fat cop with the code name of “Redbeard”. The villains, though, are brilliantly insane in the typical Bond villain/henchmen manner, their entrances announced with a title card and flashback to their pasts, and well, they just look so much more interesting than the good guys. I suspect they had more fun, too.

The Tiger Blade, despite its solid B-movie status and flaws, should entertain easily. It has almost non-stop action, occasional comic humour, captivating villains, and a good looking lead actor.

First published at incinemas on 18 May 2006

Invisible Waves (2006)

An surreal film about the mysterious ways of the universe

There are directors who put their unique stamp on every film they make. Lesser directors just make the same film over and over again, telling the same story with different characters, in different settings. My respect goes to Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, who infuses his oeuvre with his unique blend of absurdism and surrealism, yet makes every new film unrecognisable from his previous work. In Invisible Waves, the director brings back Tandanobu Asano, Prabda Yoon and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, collaborators from his previous film, Last Life in the Universe. I must warn you now that although familiar faces (Asao) and names (Noi and Nid) appear here, Invisible Waves is nothing like Last Life in the Universe.

The plot in Invisible Waves, if you really must know, is relatively simple: Kyoji (Asao), who lives in Macau, commutes to work every day to Hong Kong to work in a Thai restaurant. He has an affair with his boss’s wife, and when the affair is discovered, Wiwat (a fatherly and genial Toon Hiranyasap) orders Kyoji to kill her. When the deed is done, Wiwat sends Kyoji away on a cruise ship to a hideout in Phuket. What is worth watching instead, are the increasingly strange and bizarre events that occur to Kyoji during and after the cruise. In a dreamy kind of logic, these appear to mirror the assassin’s guilt, his mental breakdown, the fruits of his bad karma, or all of the above.

All of this are deliciously and unhurriedly framed by the camera work of Christopher Doyle, who manages to evoke the feeling of claustrophobia, whimsical surrealism, and a brooding sense of unease – effects far removed from his usual repertoire in Wong Kar Wai’s films or even his directorial debut, Away with Words (incidentally also starring Asano). While the use of filters and colour grading are still recognisably Doyle, audiences will feel they’re watching his famed camera work through a warped looking glass. When his cinematography is combined with the dark, distended and dissociative synthesizer soundtrack from Hualampong Riddim (who must be channelling the ghost of Mazzy Star here), Invisible Waves becomes an unsettling film that distances its audience from expectations of an easily digestible flick.

That’s not to say that Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s film is dreary or cannot be enjoyed. On the contrary, bizarre elements quickly pile up once Kyoji steps onto the cruise ship, starting with a foldable cabin bed that has a mind of its own, a bartender who wipes blood off an aquarium tank filled with sharks, and a room whose ventilator seems to be connected with the steam exhaust of the engine room! This is pure surrealism, but never as sidesplittingly funny as the weirdness that Hideki Sone’s character experiences during his long road trip in Takashi Miike’s Gozu.

Instead, the surrealism is counterbalanced by the sense of bad karma and impending retribution. In a universe that seems to make no sense, where nonsensical events plague Kyoji (including a Kang Hye-jeong, who appears to be reading her English lines phonetically), can he find a way to live with his recent actions, or make amends for what he has done? Or will the universe, with its mysterious and malevolent ways, do him in first? Pen-Ek Ratanaruang must be commended for making a film that convincingly blends surrealism and absurdism – the concepts that nothing happens for a reason, and the demand that man must find meaning and morality even if nothing makes sense – without a depressing or trite script.

Asano is perfect as the shell-shocked, almost sleepwalking assassin, while Toon Hiranyasup employs his nice-guy image honed in previous Thai films to draw a sympathetic portrait of a man who just ordered his wife killed by the same person who was having an affair with her. Eric Tsang has a memorable cameo as a monk or an ersatz monk whose mini-temple in Hong Kong is a front for a weapons shop that Kyoji patronises. The cast in Invisible Waves carry their roles solidly; a lesser ensemble would have sunk this film in an ocean of laughter.

This film is a drastic departure from Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s previous films. Dark, brooding and difficult, it may put off fans used to the cheery style of Last Life in the Universe. Even so, it signals a turning point in the director’s filmography, and I am now curious about which path his next film will take.

Invisible Waves challenges, puzzles, entertains, and engages well with its audience, provided they are in a mood to be challenged.

First published at incinemas on 22 April 2006