Body sob 19 – Review

This past weekend I sat down and watched a very terrible horror movie from Thailand. In fact it was so bad I wanted to wash the taste out of my mouth so I decided to try my hand at 2007′s Body. It combines a great story about the mind and the subconscious, multiple personality, excellent visuals and a classic Asian ghost, but this ghost is better and scarier than the classic Asian ghost we know. Chon is suffering from nightmares. He tries not to sleep because he’s scared of a girl that he sees each night in his dreams. In the dreams, the girl screams for help before she is cruelly killed. Ae, Chon’s sister is worried about the illusion that Chon sees in his dreams, so she introduces him to a psychiatrist. Chon tries to prove that what he sees is not just the illusion. Finally, Chon is right when some clues in his nightmares lead him to a morgue number 19. And now, the story of the dead body inside the morgue is gradually revealed.

It is quite a difficult movie to understand, I have to go to different discussion boards to fully understand the movie. Like the director purposely hide the truth from the audiences but the clues are provided consistently making a fair-play. If more is added to a script that is weak enough (after all, is a classic case of multiple personality disorder) with characters (almost) two-dimensional and a few touches on the ridiculous exaggeration that involuntary (the scene of Professor Dararai with the student), it must be said that the film takes big risks all the time. Do they pay off? In some parts yes, meaning…there are some actual redeeming moments. The biggest, being compared with other Asian horror movies of that kind they propped up the scare scenes with loads of great visual effects.

From here a very slow unfolding of the story begins (the movie is more than 2hours long) which inter-cuts between several characters that are brought together in the end with a twist that to me seemed pretty forced. At least I have seen the Multipersonlity-Disorder twist done way better in other movies while here many loose ends are not connected but typically for Thai movies mixed with a pretty cheesy love-story and even cheesier music. The whole thing starts really promising, then gets a little hard to watch for its endless lag in playing time and in the end, turns out to be a rather messy mix of nice ideas that just don’t fit. Frankly I was falling a sleep for the first part, I couldn’t understand well what was it about.. ghost,spirit or else.

So alas, another dud of a horror film from Thailand, although better then the last few I’ve caught. The movie is full of obvious CGI effects, and although I did list some good point earlier in this review, all I could feel was I’ve wasted two hours of my life watching this to the end, hoping that the movie would somehow redeem itself from its cliché-driven plot. The actors performed well but not up to the Hollywood standard, the strong part of this movie is the plot and the script writing. The dialoque of the Thai movie has improved a lot lately for the past few years. So, can we recommend? No. And horror fans let out a collective sigh, heard ’round the world.