Past Misdeeds: The Sisters (2004)

Original title: Pee chong air

Pim (Linina Phuttitarn), the last surviving member of a small-time band, explains to a (up until the movie's very end faceless) cop what happened to her and her band mates when they spent a night in a hotel in the country.

At first, they were only somewhat disturbed by peculiar and unsettling noises coming through the air vent in the ceiling, but soon they learned that they shared a room with a very angry female ghost staring at them from above. Escaping into the lobby didn't help much. In fact, one of them got so panicked by further ghostly manifestations in an elevator shaft that he ran out of the hotel and right into a car.

You'd hope that leaving the hotel would protect the young people from the ghost's wrath, but unfortunately she followed them to the hospital their run over friend was brought into to die. The ghost was also bringing one of these especially disturbing child ghosts with her, so it’s not surprising the next band member died in the hospital by ghost-induced suicide.

At least the less frightening ghost of a teenage girl appeared and helped the band (and us) out with some exposition. The ghost following them around belonged to a murdered prostitute whose head was deposited in the air vent the ghost initially crawled out of. Teenage ghost was her sister.

Thusly informed, our victims - having no time for scepticism – decided the safest course of action was to seek help in the nearest Buddhist temple. The head priest there already had experience with this particular ghost, and was able to tell our protagonists that whoever sees her soon dies or goes insane. He did, however, know of a ritual that could help lift this curse - but he needed everyone to sleep in the coffin of someone who died a violent death as a part of it, and it had to happen before midnight.

The whole ritual business did not work out as well as the friends had hoped, of course, and the next day found the two last survivors doing research like good Call of Cthulhu characters, delving deep into the sad and tragic past of the ghost and the rather distressing present of her family.

The seeming randomness of the supernatural attacks on the protagonists and a general feeling of inexplicability of the first half hour of The Sisters reminded me heavily of the work of Takashi Shimizu circa the original (well, original big screen) Ju-On. Director/editor/cinematographer Tiwa Moeithaisong (who directed the fantastic Meat Grinder in 2009) uses visual techniques that reminded me a lot of Shimizu - long shots from strangely disturbing angles that suggest something malevolent abound, camera movement that is slow and lingering like a paranoiac's dream.

Less Shimizu and more Moeithaisong as I learned to love him in Meat Grinder are the at this early point more confusing than illuminating fragments of flashbacks (inside of the flashback that is Pim's story for an extra dose of confusion) and the excellently artificial colour schemes in which Bava-green of course indicates the cracks through which the supernatural seeps. All this combines nicely into a feeling of losing touch with linear reality in a receptive viewer like me, so I have to admit I was a little disappointed when the ghost began to make sense.

Explanations in horror films always carry a risk of pushing the viewer out of the realm of the unexplained and creepy into the less dignified castle of ridiculousness, but Moeithaisong avoids falling into this trap by the matter-of-factness with which his film delivers its answers. Elements like the "sleeping in the coffin of a someone who died a violent death" business or the expository ghost sister should be plain ridiculous, yet the simple, underplayed earnestness with which they are presented makes them - if not exactly belonging into reality as I understand it - perfectly fitting elements of the story.

It is also illuminating to see how far a film can come without having psychologically defined characters or clear character types in it. Apart from one of them, the band members have no distinguishing character traits whatsoever, yet I found them less annoying than the usual assortment of jock, nerd, slut and good girl that typically make up horror film victims. They don't need to have more specific characterization because their characters or motivations have nothing to do with what happens to them, and their actions before they meet the ghost are utterly unimportant. These people are as doomed as soon as they step into the hotel room as the woman who would become the film's ghost was doomed through the accidents of birth (or karma, I suppose).

In the end, the only character whose psychology the film explains or is interested in is the ghost, and her psychology it explains in such a roundabout way a viewer has to work to comprehend it.


If a viewer doesn't want to put that work in, she will probably still be able to enjoy The Sisters as a solid piece of contemporary Asian horror.

Three Films Make A Post: Ruled by a female Svengali, he tortured women with his world prophecies!

Skin Strip(p)eress aka Sexy Ghost aka The Skinned Ghost (1992): What starts out as a mostly harmless (unless you're the snake who is squeezed to death or the frog who is eaten alive) piece of CATIII horror morphs into a just as harmless Lam Ching-Ying vehicle after half an hour or so. Both parts of the movie are definitely watchable - a Lam Ching-Ying vehicle does after all contain Lam Ching-Ying - but don't include anything I haven't seen done sleazier, nastier, funnier or just plain more creative in other movies.

99 and 44/100% Dead (1974): Sometimes you encounter films that are utterly inexplicable. Directed by John Frankenheimer with a cast led by Richard Harris, you'd expect a film to be at least watchable, but this gangster comedy (parody?) fails on every imaginable level as well as on levels the human mind wasn't meant to imagine. Ironically, the film's problem is not a lack of ideas but rather that it has a multitude of them, none of which is good, or clever, or funny. The film feels like nothing so much as like one of those pseudo-Tarantino movies made by directors totally unable to understand what makes Tarantino's movies work, which is quite an achievement for a film made twenty years before Tarantino's time.

If the film's aggressive tendency to laugh about its own, unfunny jokes weren't enough, there are also scenes that go on and on and on for no good reason but for Frankenheimer's wish to make the same, unfunny, joke three times in a row and horribly annoying acting that reaches from undead (Ann Turkel) to a mugging version of Michael Caine cool (Harris). It's so crap you could fertilize a farm with it.

Heaven and Hell aka Wong Jorn Pid (2012): As far as Thai horror anthologies go, Yuthlert Sippapak's and Tiwa Moeithaisong's (of whom I'd expected something better than this) film doesn't go very far. There are some misguided attempts by the directors to make their simple stories more complicated by adding either a wrong-headed stylistic conceit (hey, why not make an intensely talky story where all dialogue is delivered via intertitles!) or tonal shifts that seem random and ill-advised at best. The problem is, if the basics of your story aren't interesting enough to keep an audience's eyes open for half an hour, adding random crap to the story won't help.

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At Mystic Skull: The Sisters (2004)

Meat Grinder isn't the only film the impressive Tiwa Moeithaisong directed, and so it was just a question of time until I would come to one of his earlier films.

The Sisters is a bit more generic "Asian horror" than the later film, but it contains a lot that makes it worthwhile. My review at Mystic Skull hopefully explains what.

 

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Meat Grinder (2009)

Thailand in the 70s. The noodle vendor Buss (Mai Charoenpura) had a very disturbing childhood consisting of general abuse, paternal rape and being sold into marriage when Dad got her pregnant. The only point of light growing up was her Mum, but neither her incessant talk of vengeance nor mother's tendency to poison and chop up people (especially men) who displease her nor Mum's own abusiveness are what I typically associate with a positive influence.

Grown-up, Buss just gets by living with a little girl she herself abuses. Her gambler-rapist asshole of a husband seems to have absconded, but has left her his debts with a bunch of gangsters.

Out and about to sell her noodles, Buss is being sucked into the aftermath of a pro-democratic demonstration that is brutally struck down by the police. Attapon (Rattanaballang Tohsawat), one of the demonstrators saves her from close contact with the forces of "law" and "order", starting off something that will turn into a love affair.

Alas, Buss carries a dark secret around: she tends to solve problems like her mother did, and so her husband, his lover and soon the gangsters have all been made the base of some tasty noodle recipes.

That's the sort of thing that can really trouble a relationship, as can Attapon's way of giving Buss a reason for jealousy.

Ah, it's the old tale of a mentally disturbed person, chopping up her problems and making delicious meals out of them. However, you have probably seldom seen this story told as Meat Grinder does.

Someone seems to have warned the film's director Tiwa Moeithaisong against the evils of linear storytelling, and so the excessively simple story is told by him in an excessively complicated way. There's an abundance of flashbacks, sequences whose reality stands in doubt, missing transitions, transitional sequences that are only shown after the viewer has already puzzled out what must have happened and a scene that would have made the final twist in many a horror film but is here just a throwaway point right in the middle of the film.

Used without care, this could make for just a sloppy film, but Moeithaisong is very obviously far from careless. To my eyes, he seems to use this delinearization technique to put the film's viewer in the same state of mind Buss is in: caught in a seemingly endless repetition of abuse and violence (privately and in the public sphere) that makes it difficult to understand what is happening to her or when or why. After a certain point is reached, the film seems to say, it doesn't even matter anymore if you are the abused or the abuser, the victim or the killer.

Stylistically, Meat Grinder is a successor to the weirdness of Eurohorror and the special brand of insanity found in the independent and grindhouse cinema of the 70s, full of classically grimy violence. Moeithaisong doesn't try to imitate the older films, though, he instead uses modern filmmaking possibilities (for example my hated colour filtering, just this time used with thought) in the same spirit of freedom and nastiness and with the same interest in the social the older films had.

Mai Charoenpura does a fine acting job as Buss and is as believable when she's chopping people up as she is in the softer and more subtle moments of the film that make her Buss more than a monster, and the film is all the better thanks to her efforts.

I have read that a part of the film's narrative disjointedness could have been caused by the dubious hands of Thailand's censorship powers (who are also responsible for a neat warning text on my print whenever a cigarette appears on screen), chopping as merrily away at the film as the film's heroine would at them. If that is true, I have to congratulate them, for the film would be quite a bit less interesting with a more linear, clearer narrative, while what of violence is still on display isn't exactly nauseating to me, but more than enough to be pleasantly unpleasant.

 

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