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Ghost Of Mae Nak |
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A young couple, Mak and Nak, moves into one of
the oldest houses in the village. Everything
seems just perfect at first, but soon things
start to go terribly wrong. All of their wedding
gifts get stolen, Mak ends up in the hospital
in a coma after getting hit by a van and it
seems as if there's a spirit living in their
house. What should they do?
If you keep updated with my Thai horror movie
reviews, you know that I hate most of the DTV
ones. The theatrical ones however, usually have
a little more to offer. This also goes for The
Ghost Of Mae Nak which was obviously inspired
by the Thai hit movie Nang Nak. Unfortunately,
this is once again nothing else but a high budget
The Grudge rip-off. A ghost with a creepy, white
face and long black hair haunts a very old house.
I mean, how many times haven't we seen this
before. The good thing however is that this does
have a different twist to the concept.
This time they've introduced romance to the
concept - just like in Nang Nak, turning this
into a romantic ghost story which is pretty
nice. The love between Mak and Nak feels very
real and believe it or not, but there are
actually quite a few recognizable faces in here,
for anyone who's watched many Thai horror flicks
that is. What surprised me most about this movie
though was the photography. The colours are very
strong and vibrant which is unusual for Asian
horror flicks as they are usually pretty pale.
This gives the movie a very modern look and I'm
sure that this will be an international hit.
Another thing that makes this different from all
the other Ringu rip-offs is that this is just
filled with over-the-top gore effects. The
special effects are brilliant and really bring
the movie up a notch. The one thing that this
really fails at though is creating a creepy
atmosphere. You don't get to jump once, which
was a huge disappointment to me as I was hoping
to get scared, and while the ghost looks cool
and everything, it looks more flashy than scary.
Perhaps a bit too stylish for its own good,
The Ghost Of Mae Nak is still a pretty decent
horror flick which brings a couple of new things
into this tired concept. It seems as if Thailand
is the new Asian leader in horror movies so you
might want to check this one out, if only for
the cool gore effects.
We get a quite original decapitation, a man gets
vertically split in half (very final destination)
and we get a severed arm.
The soundtrack fails at creating any kind of
atmosphere unfortunately. This should have been
a whole lot better. It was unusual and nice to
hear some modern rock music in an Asian horror
flick though so it gets some points for that.
Ghost Of Mae Nak takes a little from The Grudge,
a little from Final Destination, a little from
The Exorcist and a lot from Nang Nak. And since
all of these are good movies, the outcome is
naturally pretty decent. You might want to check
this one out if you still haven't gotten sick
of creepy ghost girls.
Review
By: AnthroFred
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