Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Now that I’ve got a region-free DVD player in the house, I’m ready to go surf international DVD sites and start ordering things I haven’t seen. For example, I saw THE PARK listed on one site yesterday. Any good? Worth getting? Let’s see what today’s reviewer has to say...
Harry,
I spent Christmas in Thailand and I thought I'd let you fans of Asian cinema know about a couple of films I caught out there.The first is an immense semi-comic ghost story called "Buppah Rahtree" written and directed by Yuthlert Sippapak. The story concerns a lonely medical student Buppah (the beautiful Chermarn Poonyasak- almost unrecognisable as the dowdy title character) who as the film notes is like one of the many millions of books in the world that sit on the shelf that no one bothers to pick up and read. She is seduced by the attentions of the rich Ake, a student from another faculty and they begin a brief affair that ends with Buppah becoming pregnant. She is talked into having an abortion and is left to deal with the consequences as Ake moves to Europe to continue his schooling. Buppah dies alone in her apartment, but her ghost remains awaiting Ake's return, tormenting the residents in a series of wonderfully scary & comic set pieces.
This is how it begins and I can't tell you how deliriously enjoyable I found this film. Maybe it was something to do with the way the audience I saw it with was responding, there were some jokes that I didn't get, but I was laughing along anyway through the sheer joy of the film. It's a movie that isn't afraid to wear it's influences on it's sleeve and has a host of colourful background characters from the mentally disabled cafe owner, the fat transsexual hairdressers and up to the old priest who is convinced he can get rid of Buppah's ghost by following what he learned from watching "The Exorcist." There is a telling moment when a young earnest scriptwriter and his girlfriend come into the cafe and the girlfriend is complaining how no one will take her boyfriend seriously and how they detest ghost stories, to which the owner succinctly replies "Ah, fuck off!".
I truly hope this film will get distribution outside of Thailand, where it was one of the sleeper hits of the year, it is a film that effortlessly manages the balance between its humour and its horror in a way American horror can never quite succeed. The laughs are big and the scares are genuinely unsettling. Highly recommended.
The next film I saw was "The Park". I was quite excited by the prospect of this one as it was from Andy Lau one of the directors of "Infernal Affairs" and I noticed Danny Pang's (co-dir of "The Eye" & "Bangkok Dangerous") name on the poster as one of the editors. The promotional image that drew me in was nicely evocative, of a young girl standing in front of a dilapidated clown face & ferris wheel. On buying the tickets we were given 3D glasses- man, I was soo excited at this point, a creepy movie from Andy Lau & Danny pang AND 3D!!!!!
It's the old Agatha Christie story "Ten Little Indians" once more as Yen and a group of her friends (including Chermarn Poonyasak again) go to an abandoned amusement Park to find her lost brother and are picked off one by one by the evil that lurks there. Nice simple set-up absolutely woeful execution. This film is so bad, so inept you would not believe it to be true. It makes me think Alan Mak must have been the guiding hand in "Infernal Affairs". Lau displays no sense of character, no sense of pacing, one shot was even stolen wholesale from "Ju-On: The Grudge". The 3D kicks in when characters enter the haunted house, but at no point is it utilised, no one ever thrusts anything at the screen or try to scare us by jumping out at the audience. The whole thing degenerates into the two main female characters screaming at everything and I mean everything, relentlessly and none stop for more than half an hour until we reach the horribly protracted ending that made Peter Jackson's in ROTK seem short and to the point. A bad bad movie of a rejected Scooby Doo, wait no make that a rejected Scrappy Doo script... just awful. Though I do have to say there was a certain gleeful enjoyment in seeing something so terrible and it was still better than "Love Actually".
Clean Shaven
Great nick, man, and I think I’ll wait to see if anyone has anything nice to say about THE PARK before I go buying it sight unseen. You make a good case for it being miserable.
"Moriarty" out.
