Phobia

So, I'm going to write a little mini review for each short as they show and as I see them and then do a review of the movie as a whole after..

story 1: Happiness effective little ghost story using texting as a medium where a recently deceased ghost talks to a home ridden young woman. I will say that this one is pretty creepy, some great shots are displayed and some cliché stuff is also used. I liked this one a lot for some reason, I usually don't get so into movies using cell phones as main plot devices, I.e. one missed call.

story 2: Tit For Tat Bad nu metal in Thai playing almost constantly, check. Attractive main cast bullies who picks on nerdy kid, check. Revenge story? Yes. This one plays out a little similar to another thai film, Art of the Devil 2 which I didn't enjoy too much. It's directed by the dude who did Shutter, which I also didn't like so much.. But despite the awful CG at the end, I enjoyed this one, it was fun and predictable. Predictable may be bad other places, but I enjoyed it here.

story 3: In the Middle I started out disliking this one.. Nu metal, kayaking, stereotypical teenage dudes.. But it's ripe with movie references, comedy that's actually funny, and a pretty decently creepy story. Based on other reviews I thought this might be a lot worse but I actually really enjoyed it.

story 4: Last Fright Probably my favorite of the 4 shorts just because it was built up so well. This one had the most 'classic' feel to it and was a lot of fun, I jumped on the inside a couple times and was into this one all the way through. Nice little Hitchcockian score also.

Anyway, Fun is the best way to describe this nice little anthology. I grew up on Tales From the Crypt and Creepshow and I'm recently in the past years getting more and more into Asian cinema so this is a film I've been looking forward to. Bottom line, it entertained me and that's all I need.

A great rental at least!

The 1st story fell right into my pool of likeliness. Delivering the story without a single dialogue was done well.

2nd story was all right but I really didn't like the editing such as lot of shaky camera, flashes all of a sudden and CGI was not so satisfying. Story and writing was okish.

3rd one felt like a drag to me from the beginning but felt a lot more in the middle, the actors acted wacky in times of fear but the ending was somewhat good or whatever.....

4th in my opinion didn't deliver as much, all could be predictable from the beginning.

Anthology of four horror stories. Most are only ok. The first one is about a lone girl in her apartment. She's been stuck there for three months while her broken leg heals. She starts getting texts from some guy who wants to come up to her apartment but she doesn't even know him. Plus she's all alone. The second is about the kid who gets bullied to death. The third is the story of the friends who go camping and river-rafting until they lose one of the boys to the river. The last is the story of a stewardess on a plane with one passenger, a princess. They none of them are all that; mostly these are mildly entertaining stories.

I enjoyed this film very much despite having limited expectations. Each of the four segments plays out smoothly with few cheap scares and reasonably coherent plot development. That said, none of the chapters are particularly scary and it's all stuff we've seen before. What set it apart for me was the wry ingenuity of Man in the Middle and one small detail in The Last Flight - at one stage when the stewardess is serving the Princess, sunlight reflection from the aeroplane window moves slowly across the bulkhead behind as if the plane is banking. A nice touch. I can overlook that the galley interior is of a much larger plane than the 737 portrayed externally :-).

4Bia, actually title PHOBIA, is a pretty predictable Asian horror anthology, I was mildly entertained but there were no surprises here; those well-versed in Asian horror will see most of the "shocking twists" coming from a mile away. Now that doesn't necessarily mean the film is bad, it just means Thailand has the same problem we do…played-out predictability sells well in theaters. If this were to have been released in the U.S., it would have ended up going straight-to-DVD. This isn't a bad flick, I actually enjoyed "Tit for Tat" and it's stylish CG and the goofy horror comedy of "In The Middle" but nothing really jumped out at me as original or different. It's all pretty average, a "been there, done this" experience indeed.