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Crying Tree, The |
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Every guy seems to be in love with the beautiful
female owner of a resort. This leads to conflicts
between workers, guests and cops. One day someone
gets enough and dresses up in black and starts
killing every guy who makes an attempt to hit on
the girl. It seems as if everyone has motives so
everyone's a suspect, but who's the real killer?
I rarely check out older Asian horror flicks but
after having watched the Swedish slasher Death
Academy I really was in the mood for another
slasher. I've read a couple of reviews of this
one and they were all pretty bad. I didn't agree
with most of them (as usual you might say). This
Thai slasher brings nothing new to the genre
except for the fact that the killer sings every
time he's about to kill someone, this was however
a stupid idea and makes the movie feel rather
cheesy. The Crying Tree is basically scream set
in a luxurious resort where someone slaughters
everyone who hits on the female owner of the
resort. As I'm a huge slasher fan I practically
guessed who the killer was right away but for
more inexperienced slasher fans, the killer
could actually come as a surprise.
The movie suffers from a lot of flaws though.
First of all, we have the ridiculous singing.
Second of all, three of the deaths happen close
to cars, one is where the killer picks up a
guy who's hitching (who gets into a car with
a person fully dressed in black wearing a black
mask anyway?), the second two just involve
cars breaking down and the killer popping up.
And finally, third of all there are simply a
lot of things not making any sense, like what
kind of cop beats up his suspect with a fat
phone catalogue? Other than that I thought the
movie was pretty well done.
It's a shame that the teen slasher wave died
out since I loved that wave. Jun-Ka-Poor is
one of the movies I managed to miss but even
if it took a while until I got around to see
it, I still don't think that I would have liked
it much better back when it was first released.
The movie does look a bit like a TV film and
the sound on the Thai DVD was really bad, some
of the dialogue was actually only heard through
the subwoofer so whenever someone would speak
the entire dialogue would come out as bass.
This is far from as annoying as you'd think
it would be, there are only a couple of scenes
with this phenomenon and all in all, I'm
surprised at how much I liked this.
Oh, here's another surprise, it was actually
relatively gory. We get an axe in the back,
hearts torn out of bodies, some nasty holes
in the bodies, a couple of stabbings, and
some spear impalements. Pretty nice.
The soundtrack feels like we've heard it before
apart from some really bad Thai pop music. Other
than that the soundtrack sounds pretty stylish
and if they ripped it out of other horror movies,
they did a damn nice job choosing what to rip out.
While there are definitely a lot of better slashers
out there, The Crying Tree wasn't a total waste of
time. It has some decent gore, a good soundtrack
and a masked killer. Since it's been a while since
it was released on DVD in Thailand it might be
difficult to track down a copy of this, so slasher
fans, let the hunt begin!
Review By: AnthroFred
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