Unhuman
Director: Toranong Sricher
Stars: Sira Pathrat, Chollada Mekratree, Naravan
Niruthisai
Time: 108 minutes
Year: 2004
This film came as an unexpectedly
enjoyable gore-fest in which the director throws a little bit of everything
into a soup and stirs madly. It is not great filmmaking but you have to appreciate
the enthusiasm. These days it is so difficult finding legitimate horror films
from Thailand when ordering over the Internet – the DVD cover looks intriguing
and the premise seems decent and so you click “buy” – but the vast majority
of them are really poor grade straight to video dreck. I put two films on
prior to this one in trying to get a third review for this page – the first
one “Devil Species” looked like it was someone’s vacation home video with
a bunch of falangs having a picnic. I am sure something terrible happened
to them but I didn’t stick around to find out. Next was “Haunted Dorm” –
it’s one of those many Thai DVDs that extols its 3-D capabilities – I guess
it was mildly 3-D but five minutes into it and I was bored to death with
its cheap look and gave up on it. After those two, “Unhuman” at least felt
like a real movie with real ambitions.
It doesn’t start off promisingly.
Five young 20-somethings are up from Bangkok to visit the countryside to
watch some meteor showers that are scheduled to pass by later that night
and I feared yet another weak teen running around type of film ahead of me
– but it goes off in a completely different direction or directions that
are fairly wild and fun. One of the meteors crashes not far from them and
strange things begin happening soon afterwards. The military arrives and
seals off the area and the bloody remains of people begin to be discovered
in the jungle. There is also a research lab nearby and their workers begin
vanishing or showing up dead and the head of the company and his queen bitch
right hand lieutenant start leading hunting parties into the jungle to find
whatever is killing their people. The military sends a few squads into the
jungle as well as do the police along with those original five folks from
Bangkok and soon the jungle is littered with dead bodies.
Creatures are roaming the
jungle – some looking like gorillas, others like the creature from the black
lagoon – with scales and a long tail – others more like the predator – but
what they have in common is that they have a hunger – for human flesh – and
the nearby village is like a fast food restaurant. There are more organ removals
than at an Aztec sacrifice ceremony on a Friday night. Did they come from
outer space or are they somehow connected to the research lab. A female witch
doctor seems to gain control of them and sends them into a frenzy of killing
and it seems only a Buddhist priest and some virgin blood can stop her. The
queen bitch draws out some of the creatures by swimming nude in a pond –
attracting their primordial sexual urgings – and happily rips out the heart
of one of them. Throw in a big fire fight between the army and Burmese rebels,
some monster impregnation, a needed heart transplant and body parts everywhere
and you have some fairly trashy entertainment.
This clearly falls into
B film territory in which it appears that the director tries to bring in
bits and pieces of many of his favorite B movies. It has a solid budget though
with nice sets and a lot of folks running around getting killed. My only
real complaint is that whenever the monsters show up it tends to be dark
or the director plays with the speed or movement of the camera so that you
never get a really good look at them – whether this was to create a sense
of danger or simply because the cheapness of their costumes would have been
obvious I can’t say.
My rating for this film:
6.5