Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 23, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
While horror anthologies have fallen on hard times Stateside in last decade, with the very sporadic likes of Trapped Ashes relegated to the most limited big-screen play before heading to DVD, the format has flourished in Asia. The Three movies, Unholy Women and others bespeak Far East producers’ commitment to offering tasty samplers of different kinds of fear, and Thailand has now entered the fray with the cleverly monikered 4BIA. Like all its predecessors, this one’s a mixed bag, but its good far outweighs its bad, and more than any of its predecessors, it offers a genuine variety of stylistic approaches, revealing just how broad the genre’s possibilities are. At Montreal’s Fantasia, where the film had its international premiere, one of the quartet of filmmakers remarked that there had been some discussion about how to order the segments, but a viewing leaves one with the impression that the arrangement seen in the final feature is the only obvious choice.
4BIA gets off to a quiet, measured start with “Happiness”—rather ironic, given that director Youngyooth Thongkonthun has previously specialized in broad comedies like The Iron Ladies and Metrosexual. It proceeds from a simple, Rear Window-esque premise: A young woman, stuck in her apartment thanks to the cast on her leg, communicates with the outside world via cell phone and text messages. She begins receiving the latter from a stranger, who seems friendly enough, and there’s no reason for her to read between the lines when he mentions that he’s currently dwelling somewhere “cramped.” Soon she’s sending him her picture—and that’s when things get spooky. Using no dialogue (Thongkonthun thankfully eschews the American approach of characters speaking the cyber-words they’re typing; we simply read the two characters’ messages, with amusing use of on-line contractions in the subtitles), Thongkonthun builds an incremental sense of dread, and pays it off with a very satisfying jolt.
Following this subtle introduction, Paween Purikitpanya (who scripted and helmed the chiller Body #19 last year) goes too far in the other direction with “Tit for Tat.” This one is yet another saga of a murdered youth (a short-haired boy, at least, instead of a long-haired girl) who achieves revenge from beyond the grave on his killers, in this case a group of nasty high-school bullies. Despite being written by Ekasit Thairath, who penned the comic that inspired the genuinely unsettling 13: Game of Death, this script is boilerplate stuff, playing like a condensed Final Destination movie as the bad kids are dispatched in gory, supernaturally contrived “accidents.” And Purikitpanya’s direction goes way over the top with annoying, too-familiar shaky-cam and rapid-fire-editing tricks; a little of this goes a long way and it’s used throughout “Tit for Tat,” to the point of inspiring headaches instead of shivers.
4BIA gets back on track in a big way with the palate-cleansingly hilarious “In the Middle,” from Shutter co-writer/co-director Banjong Pisanthanakun. Deftly generating big, knowing laughs while playing things straight, he introduces us to a quartet of high-school guys on a rafting trip as they lie in their tent one night, teasing and trying to scare each other with talk of ghosts. They conjecture about what the safest place is to sleep before one of them asks the long-unspoken question: “Have you noticed that ghosts in movies are always girls with long dark hair over their eyes?” (I was reminded of the wonderful moment in Gamera 3, a Fantasia highlight from a decade ago, in which a Japanese official muses, “Why is Japan continually being attacked by monsters?” Both lines brought the house down.)
It’s not long before the buddies get into a rafting accident that one of the group barely survives—or does he? While keeping you guessing, Pisanthanakun makes all of his young protagonists engaging and likable while skewering popular cinema in general and his own work in particular (making a case that Shutter was ripped off from Titanic!). It’s not easy to make fun of a genre while simultaneously respecting it, but Pisanthanakun pulls it off here.
His Shutter partner Parkpoom Wongpoom closes things out with “Last Fright,” returning to a traditional occult narrative but adding wrinkles of story and setting we haven’t seen before. Our heroine here is a stewardess who’s assigned to be the sole crewmember on a chartered airliner on which the sole passenger is a haughty, abusive princess—who has a good and specific reason to dislike her server. More of the storyline should not be discussed; suffice to say that Wongpoom gradually and gracefully eases from the tension simply generated by the uncomfortable dynamic between the two women to more overtly horrific areas. The ultimate resolution isn’t all that surprising, but the final shot contains a nice, creepy visual punchline paying off a passage of the princess’ dialogue earlier in the segment.
Every so often, there are little references in one chapter about events in the other, but each of 4BIA’s segments stands on its own, and three out of four of them would be worth watching without the support of the others. Together, they combine for a four-course meal of fear that offers more distinctive flavors than many films of this type, and leaves one hungry for more like it from the Thai horror industry.
