Bangkok Haunted
Director: Pisuth Praesaeng-Iam ("Legend of
the Drum" and "Black Magic Woman")
Oxide Pang (" Revenge")
Year: 2002
Starring: Pimsiree Pimsee (Jieb), Dawan
Singha-wee (Pan), Kalyanut Sriboonrueng (Gunya), Pete Thong-juer (Nop)
Time: 2 hrs 10 minutes
A film clearly has to be more than a few memorable
images that capture your imagination. I had seen the trailer for this film
a few months ago and was knocked out by it – a series of fast moving images
of an eyeless woman, a corpse in a morgue blinking, an eerie traditional
Thai dance, long razor sharp fingernails searching for a victim, a woman
hanging from a rope – that made the film look both exotic and inviting.
Unfortunately, after finally having the opportunity to see it the film’s
quality does not match those retina-retaining images. The film contains
three supernatural tales – all told by three modern women sitting around
a table at a Bangkok bar. One problem that the segments all have is they
all run a bit long – all over 40 minutes – and feel slightly padded. Another
issue is that though I thought all the stories had a definite potential,
they somehow fell short of it – either by ending on a lackluster note or
simply not making a lot of sense.
The word of mouth on the film has been pretty
negative – in fact one web site I came upon had a poll and 87% of the nearly
100 respondents voted that they “hated it”. I can’t quite understand this
reaction to the film – perhaps I have suffered through too many Troublesome
Night films, but I thought there was a lot to enjoy here. The production
standards are high, the cinematography is excellent, the locales are interesting
and the stories are intriguing and original even if lacking in scares and
finally being disappointing. The first two episodes are directed by Pisuth
Praesaeng-Iam while the final one was directed by Oxide Pang.
Legend of the Drum (44 minutes) – Jieb accidentally
receives an old drum in a shipment that appears to have an angry history
behind it. She begins seeing apparitions and wonders if there is a connection
to the drum. The story flashes back to 1917 Bangkok in which a love between
a Thai dancer and a musician comes to tragedy – somehow the drum seems
to have carried a spirit inside that is looking for something – but exactly
what is never made clear.
Corpse Oil (40 minutes) – Pan isn’t having much
luck of late with the opposite sex and so when her not so attractive next
door neighbor - who seems to have lots of male lovers - tells her that
it is due to a love potion, Pan skeptically gives it a go. The results
are amazing good – much too good it turns out - the contents for
the potion come from the local morgue and seem to carry all the bitterness
of their former owners. Be prepared for a lot of vomiting.
Revenge (45 minutes) – a policeman is sure that
an apparent suicide of a young woman by hanging has to be murder – where
is the chair – why are there marks of a struggle - and he sets out to find
the killer. As he proceeds it becomes clear that the ghost of the woman
is helping – or is she? This one had a pretty good plot and a clever ending
that I didn’t see coming till the very end and neither did the cop.
My rating for this film: 6.0