Bangkok Haunted

I had watched "The Eye" before I watched this one. I really liked "The eye", it was one of the best movies of the recent Asian horror-cinema. So, I picked this "Bangkok haunted" because it was the same director, and it was kind of popular round here. But man, what a disappointment... "Bangkok haunted" are three stories about love, revenge, ghosts, etc. that are no scary at all, not even disturbing (as "The eye" was)... no nothing. I can't even fill the 10 lines required for the comment...

100% boring.

*My rate: 2/10

I thought the movie was fantastic. The scares weren't over-the-top at all; neither were they overused. Some horror fans will be disappointed by the lack of many, but I thought that when the scares DID come, they were fantastic. Oxide and Pisuth definitely know when to utilize a scare within a certain scene and I thought this movie was just overall, amazing. Great stories, good endings, and awesome cinematography.

The only negative that I can give is that the stories were slightly confusing, but definitely not impossible to understand. And characters are used over and over again in different stories, so it was sort of hard to follow characters when they were someone else in a different story. But like I said, another watch-through, and it cleans up all the loose ends. This movie would definitely be useful to watch during a night with some friends over, so that discussion can follow and clear up what you missed. Awesome movie, but don't expect many scares--just like 28 Days Later, this serves as more of a drama horror film, rather than a true horror one.

I saw this movie some time ago, hoping it was going to be as good as The Eye was, but I was greatly disappointed to see that the stories weren't very good and the scares were lacking. Don't bother checking this expecting another The Eye.

As with most people familiar with Oxide Pang, my introduction to this movie came through the creepy spook film, "The Eye". I was genuinely impressed with The Eye, and, eager to find more films by Oxide and his brother Danny, i came across Bangkok Dangerous and Bangkok Haunted. Dangerous is a flick about a mute assassin, which i found to be very well made with some excellent editing and solid direction. Unfortunately, Bangkok Haunted failed to impress. I only found out after viewing the movie that only the third segment was directed by Oxide Pang, and Danny (the man behind the brilliant editing in Dangerous) had nothing to do with the film. From the start the movie attempts to creep out the audience, but the elaborate ghost stories are neither scary nor visually impressive. Throughout the three segments of the film, the spooks fail to spook, and the film fails as a horror flick. Clocking in at over two hours, this is an over-stretched movie that could have fitted easily into three half hour segments. While there are promising thing to be taken from the film, the stories are generally boring and more laughable than scary. This film could have been alot better, and i am glad that i rented it instead of rushing out to buy it.

We have a very strong start as we open upon a story that is sort of like an Asian phantom of the Opera with incest. A young girl and her brother live happily in a small village until one day traveling visitors bring a man the girl starts to fall in love with. Her jealous brother, with a deformed face he always hides, decides to wreak havoc, and the ghost of the young girl gets endowed into a drum that travels the country haunting whoever happens to be close by.

Tthhhheeeeennnn the movie reveals that it's just a story being told, and that three young Thai women at a restaurant are telling each other ghost stories. The thing about these types of narratives is that they fundamentally ruin the point of the stories in the first place. Horror is made to terrify, right? So how can we appropriately fear for characters' lives and souls when we know they're fake? Even beyond the level of fakenss inherent in any medium, we now are twice removed from the characters' psyches: once because we're actually watching a television screen, and twice because we're watching characters tell stories about characters that don't exist diagetically.

Worse, the next two stories turn out to have that wonderful flavor of, "Huh, I've heard variants of this before." Yep, suddenly we move away from the interesting story (which also, interestingly, had much better dialog, direction, cinematography, and just about everything) that held our attentions for 40 minutes, and then we follow two other stories for another hour and a half that are, when you break it down, merely urban legends.

Gee, and I was so enjoying the beginning.

To be fair, the third story isn't THAT bad, and since it's a mystery it's a little nice to follow. But the second story is just soo boring! It's very disappointing to be enjoying yourself and then have the director say, "Okay, so, we're done with that, now to move on!" Two things you should never do in a horror movie because it's no longer fresh and now it becomes slightly insulting: never have it end up being just a dream, and never have it end up being just a story.

--PolarisDiB