In rural Thailand, six highschool graduates reunite to meet their former teacher. That wasn't such a good idea. Two years before, they had exposed their teacher's lover, got into trouble and hired a Cambodian witchdoctor to kill him with black magic. And now, the teacher has learned a thing or two about black magic herself...
Art of the Devil 2 (Long Khong ลองของ) is another addition to the recent wave of Asian horror films. Most of these haven't impressed me greatly, since their horror tends to be so culturally based. Musically cued cuts to shots of ghostly figures just aren't terribly frightening in the West, not just because it's all been done before, but because levels of credulity and acceptance of the supernatural are lower than in Asia.
Certainly this is a film that seeks to milk the Thai dread of dark magic for all it's worth. We open with a sequence showing the teacher's lover being disembowelled from within by fish-hooks — not an easy concept to visualise, but shot nevertheless with gruesome clarity. It's almost worth seeing the film for the makeup and prosthetic effects alone. It's very hard to get poor effects past film-literate Thai audiences, and the producers seem to be well aware of that.
On the other hand, director Kongkai Komesri's leaden direction and ham-fisted storytelling has little to recommend it; and so the film is damned to the mediocre ranks of genre-dom. That karaoke version of 'Bird' Thongchai Mcintyre's เบิร์ด ธงไชย Fan Ja has sadly gone to waste!
- Official site (with a low-res trailer almost certainly not rated by any regulatory body).
weres kim...in art of the devil..
Posted by: jhogar | March 19, 2007 at 11:13 PM