2000's Asian Horror Part Seventeen

BATTLE ROYALE
(2000)
Dir - Kinji Fukasaku
Overall: GOOD

The final film to be completed before its director Kinji Fukasaku's death three years later, Battle Royale, (Batoru Rowaiaru), proved to have a lingering influence, ushering in a wave of "last man/woman/teen standing" properties.  Fukasaku's son Kenta adapted Koushun Takami's sensationalized, youth outrage novel of the same name which depicts a dystopian scenario where Japan allows for teenagers to engage in mass murder against each other on an island that is monitored by armed military personnel and Takeshi Kitano's unfeeling ringleader.  Featuring an ensemble cast of young adults plus a few grownups, Fukasaku pits everyone against each other with disturbing glee, often leaning into dark, absurdist humor that both sweetens the character's brutal situation and enhances the intended "fable" tone.  The film can be looked at as a cruel examination of the uncertainty of what may or may not await middle school youths, throwing them into a survival of the fittest nightmare that still finds room for them to contemplate and act upon their comparatively petty social dramas while being brutally gunned-down at a moment's notice.  Either that or it is just a fun, boundary-pushing action movie done on an impressive and relentlessly compelling scale.

 

AB-NORMAL BEAUTY

(2004)

Dir - Oxide Pang

Overall: MEH

 

Still a collaborative effort between the Pang Brothers Thomas and Oxide as they both penned the screenplay, Ab-normal Beauty, (Photos of Death, Sei mong se jun), is the first solo directorial effort to fall exclusively into the horror genre from the latter.  A mostly unsuccessful pairing of conventional thriller, harrowing drama, and quasi-torture porn, the narrative takes an abrupt, random turn in the third act that results in a convoluted, hilariously bad twist that changes the landscape into brutalized ridiculousness.  While Race and Rosanne Wong, (both sisters and both members of the cantopop duo 2R), deliver solid performances, they are also oddly cast as an all but blatantly lesbian couple.  Even though the full romantic extent of their relationship thankfully remains unconsummated on screen, it is still unavoidably eye-brow raising in perhaps an unintended manner.  More problematic though is the underwritten nature of their characters and the aforementioned about-face plot shift that muddles up the already complicated emotional psyche of Race's troubled protagonist.  In the end, it merely addresses such issues as voyeurism, death fetishes, repressed trauma, and closeted sexuality without having a convincing enough through-line for any of them.

ALONE
(2007)
Dir - Banjong Pisanthanakun/Parkpoom Wongpoom
Overall: MEH

An unremarkable follow-up to their 2004 debut Shutter, Thai writer/director team Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom's Alone, (Fad), sticks to contemporary scare tactics and atmosphere as much as it does previously established motifs that are associated with "one bad twin, one evil twin" movies.  Returning to the screen for the first time in fifteen years, Marsha Vadhanapanich plays a woman who is haunted by the vengeful spirit of her dead conjoined sister, which of course means that every other character that she encounters insists that such a haunting is all in her imagination, in typical hacky horror screenplay fashion.  Aside from such lazy gaslighting, we also have easily foreseeable jump scares, pitch black cinematography, spooky images in reflective surfaces, and a twist ending that should be easy enough to spot long before it is delivered.  Performance wise, Vadhanapanich and everyone else involved give it their all and the film has a slick production that may not be well-suited for effective and sinister surprises, but it at least looks decent when some of the lights are on and the camera stays focused enough so that we can tell what we are looking at.  Also just to slam home the redundant ideas here, the film has to-date been remade five times, most in rapid succession and in the Bollywood circuit.