Given my love and fascination with Asian cinema, then of course I opted to sit down and watch this 2022 Vietnamese horror movie titled "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" (aka "The Nightmares"), as I stumbled upon it by random luck here in 2023.
Never having heard about this movie from director Dinh Cong Hieu, I must admit that I didn't know what I was in for, nor what to expect aside from it being a horror movie.
Well, "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" wasn't exactly an impressive horror movie. Sure, it was watchable, but it was by no means a memorable or particularly scary movie. And for someone whom have been watching horror movies for the majority of his entire life, then "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" was a mere walk in the park. Even by Asian horror movie standards, then director Dinh Cong Hieu's movie wasn't impressive.
It was the total absence of actual horror that made this a dull movie. If anything, then "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" felt more like a mid-1980s thriller, you know the type where the leading actress is stalked throughout the course of the movie by an assailant that we never get to see the face of before the very end of the movie.
So "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" was more of a thriller than it actually was a horror movie, and that was also something that worked against the overall enjoyment factor of the movie, because I was expecting this to be a proper horror movie.
And with a storyline that was hands down bland and generic, then "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" didn't exactly make for a particularly good entertainment choice.
I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, as I am not that well-traversed in the Vietnamese cinema. But the actors and actresses were struggling with having very limited material to work with to bring to the screen.
My rating of "Vo Dien Sat Nhan" lands on a three out of ten stars.
