In a happy development for cult and genre-film fans, non-English-language offerings beyond the highbrow are continuing to trickle out on Blu-ray Disc. And while you can’t buy a HD copy of My Blueberry Nights in the U.S. (and with the dollar in the toilet, who can afford to import movies these days?), you can pick up this lesser-known Thai horror-fantasy from 2006. Directed by Pleo Sirisuwan, it’s a low-budget adventure about the various creatures — human, humanoid and otherwise — lurking deep inside the jungle. It’s one of those movies where the hero’s face gets more and more jacked up and bloody as it goes along.
As a gang of escaped convicts heads deeper into the tropical forest,
and a team of cops follows, there are dark forces at work, from very
human bloodlust — one of the criminals, Nasor (Chalat Na Songkla), has a personal score to
settle with cop Muadwut (Andy Tungkaphasert) — to the curse that has descended on a remote
village as well as the local fauna, which has turned notably ferocious.
It’s not a bad movie, though the shifts in modality are a little
disorienting. It starts off as a generic Asian cops-and-robbers
actioner, shifts gear into intriguingly grim fairy-tale territory
before spoiling the mood by spending a reel aping Anaconda, and
then climaxes in a full-on village-of-the-damned jamboree. (When one of
the characters suddenly suggested time travel, I felt like my head
would explode.)
The raison d’etre here is clearly the
film’s fairly extensive CG work, which includes fanciful jungle
beasties that range from nasty mini-alligators to a gigantic snake that
coils around trees and crushes the unlucky between its teeth — it’s a
showcase piece for local VFX studios striving to demonstrate that they
can compete globally.
The quality of the CG ranges from not bad at all
to pretty terrible, and the irony is that the movie is at its best when
it eschews the digital beasties altogether, relying instead on
prosthetics, latex, and the good old creep factor. A scene depicting an
encounter with some enchanted “fruit tree maidens” is sexy and creepy
(like certain spiders, they eat their mates), and the make-up effects
in the film’s final section are garish and engaging if not particularly
original. (I was reminded several times of Rick Baker’s work, which is
by no means a dis.)
Mostly, it’s an intriguing film
to watch, with cinematographer Sittipong Kongtong’s moody lighting
and foreshortened color palette lending the faces a desperate pallor
and shrouding the jungle in shadow enough to sell its mystical status
and imbue it with lyrical qualities — a scene where Wut
cuddles up with a beautiful village woman as fireflies hang in the air
around them is just about the most gorgeously and guilelessly romantic
image in my Blu-ray collection (not counting every frame of Saawariya). B-