Thailand's Horror is L7.
I took the bait. I saw a small collection of Thai horror films growing on the shelf at Jah-Jah Records. It looked like the tip of an iceberg. It looked quite possible, from what I saw on the shelf, that Thai horror was going to be the next big wave in Asian cinema. . . and I would be there to catch it, full force, with my purchase of "Die-covery."
It looked promising, the sub-genre is zombie-ghost, and the cover is just nasty.
First off the camerawork is solid. The director, Kulachat Jitkhachorn-wanich, borrows heavily from Evil Dead. In fact, the hero and heroine are on vacation in an old resort and. . .
Anyhow, the whole thing was filmed on something that was halfway between a high-end digital camera and the gear they use to record television shows. The effect of seeing this image quality with the deft editing is very arresting at times.
The characters themselves aren't made to suffer enough on screen. The acting is on par with something you'd see on Thai prime time. That's a guess, anyway. Anyhow, the cast's lack of talent coupled with much of pointless dialog takes the whole production into the absurd.
The bulk of the hero's lines is his wife's name. "Mook. . . Mook. . . Mook. . ." He sounds like one of the monsters from Sesame Street. One of the monsters that crawled up from out of a landfill, severely brain damaged, after having his tongue chewed out by rats.
And there it sits, for the Thai audience. Poorly written and poorly performed by anyone's standard.
And yet, for those of us noncoversant in Thai, the movie is pushed over into the surreal by the hack-job subtitling and the second-rate culture shock.
You wouldn't think so, walking through Pat Pang's "Gash Alley," but the Thai government obviously goes to great lengths to protect it's movie-going audience from the more puerile elements popular in present-day cinema.
The beach hugging scene, for istance, has our herorine in a halter top and white shorts. You can't really tell she's wearing a bra until she gets into the sack with her husband. At which point, he strips her down to her bra and shorts and she leaves him naked to the waist in his jeans. The heavy petting and necking get pretty intense, all under a thirty-pound blanket, until the heroine mistakes a golden cobra for her husband's cock.
No, her lips do not swell up to the size of guavas, but the aforementioned mishap nicely sums up the requisite Asian low-brow humor that takes up so much screen time.
The subtitling, the whole way through, was by far more funny than anything the director pur on the screen. Nothing but "Mook. . . Mook. . . Mook. . ." comes to mind, though.
What really won me over was the Buddhist moralizing. Great stuff. The whole enterprise had the reek of an afterschool special to it.
All in all, bad, but not bad enough.