SYNOPSIS:
It happens one night when the police are informed that people heard a scream of a girl from a house. The police arrive at the house to find that its owner is a 30- year-old woman who just moved in with her 7-year-old daughter. The kid shows symptoms of mental illness. Her arms are bruised. The mother refuses to have her daughter sent for a medical check-up. However, due to legal condition, she has to take her daughter to see a psychiatrist. And that is the first time Krit meets Ing-Orn and the poor neurotic girl “Pare”.
During the treatment Ing-Orn tells Krit about Pare’s symptoms of hallucination and paranoid. However, the girl insists that she has been harassed by the evil spirit of a boy. Krit sympathizes with Pare because she is of the same age as his child. But the closer Krit gets to this family, the more he feels that the house has some mysterious ambience and there are some inexplicable things happening…
MOVIE REVIEW:
There was a period we remember being bombarded by horror movies originating from The Land of a Thousand Smiles. We were reviewing them by the hordes and we would fondly call this slew of movies “The Sawasdee Curse”. Of course, some of them were better than the others, and with successful Thai horror movies like 4bia and Coming Soon scaring audiences on the big screen, we know it’s a genre which will continue to, well, curse us movie reviewers.
We also know that the very good looking Ananda Everingham (The Leap Years, Pleasure Factory) is hot property in this part of the world, and DVD distributors will do anything to release his works here to entice fans. And that is why we are playing this movie on our player – a horror thriller which looks almost, err, erotic.
Everingham exudes his charms as a psychiatrist (all he needs to do is to put on those geeky glasses to look like an intellectual psychiatrist) who attends to a young girl who shows signs of mental illness and looks like she has been abused. She has just moved into a new house with her mother and the poor girl claims that she is being harassed by the evil spirit of a young boy. Although the mother refuses to have her daughter sent for medical check ups, the righteous psychiatrist feels that there is a truth to be uncovered.
And how right he is – the truth he is searching for will prove to be so shocking (prepare yourself for a visual image during the movie’s finale that will leave you agape for a while) that it gets an extra half a point from us. Besides, that, the 90 movie moves at a rather slow pace, meandering at an aimless tempo during its first half. Sure, some may see this as setting up the plot for that revelation at the end, but the shocks and scares are nothing we haven’t seen in other Thai horror movies before.
Then we realized that this DVD is rated M18. So there we were, expecting a few good scares – until we saw that the consumer advice is “Some Sexual Scenes”. Hence, instead of blood, beheaded bodies and everything gory, we get a few, err, erotically shot lovemaking scenes between Everingham (yes, how else could the filmmakers exploit one of the hottest male stars in Thailand?) and co star Mai Charoenpura (The Legend of Suriyothai). To the male species, Chairoenpura is indeed alluring, and we don’t blame the filmmakers for exploiting that aspect of the female star.
We sure hope that the next movie we get to review brought upon us by “The Sawasdee Curse” will be remarkable as this.
SPECIAL
FEATURES:
This
Code 3 DVD contains no bonus features.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
There is nothing to complain about the disc’s visual transfer, and is presented in its original Thai audio track.
MOVIE RATING:
 
DVD
RATING:
Review by John Li
|
