Art of the Devil (2004)
The franchise that’s as reliable and frequently as uncomfortable as Saw—only 900 times better—returns: Horrorama rises again! Furor started us off right with US-by-way-of-Japan and saved me a review I wasn’t looking forward to doing (even though it DID have Raimi’s name on it). So with my preciously spared time, what did I do? Brought you Thailand-by-way-of-Thailand horror about black magic women!
I already like where this movie's going!
Premise: 3/5
Boom is a hot young thing who makes the mistake of becoming the mistress of a hugely rich, hugely douchebag-y family man. Then she gets pregnant, squeezes him for some cash, and gets gang-raped by a group of pals he invites over to their private beachhouse retreat. Hilarity ensues!
Shortly after the super-fun rape scene (which is honestly, I think, scarier than most of the supernaturally scary shit that comes later), Boom enlists the aid of some kind of black magic (it looks similar to voodoo to me, but I don’t know if there’s some Thai equivalent that this is instead) priest to help her get her revenge on the man who betrayed her and basically sold her out to be raped. Several nasty blood-soaked deaths settle her score against the rapists and their families, while Boom anticipates getting Captain Douchebag’s estate now that he’s out of the way—too bad for all involved it doesn’t turn out that way, as Captain Douchebag had a second family on the side that he’d divorced himself from a long time ago. With no direct heirs (Boom’s voodoo friend took care of that pretty decisively), the estate falls to his ex-wife and her children. Not a bad premise, but so much of the movie after the first 20 minutes or so is aimless rambling as Boom gets close to the new family so she can knock them off one at a time to get her hands on the mansion and the inheritance that she feels should’ve fallen to her and her (oddly absent—think this might be a plot point?) child.
I'm not sure exactly what she's doing in this shot, but I am sure of one thing: there's an internet fetish site all about it lurking somewhere out there.
Cast: 2/5
Actually, most of the actors and actresses are fairly decent, as far as I can tell. I watched the whole thing subtitled and have no idea how the Thai language is supposed to sound, so basically I’m just going off whether they looked like they were trying, and I think all of them were. I also have to say, the 2 lead actresses in this film were really easy on the eyes, particularly Arisa Wills, who plays Nan, the daughter in the unfortunate second family—she lights up the screen every time she’s on, and I usually wasn’t able to take my eyes off her. Well, unless the geeky reporter Danai (played by Somchai Satuthum) who’s been working on this black magic murder story for over a year was on—then his alarmingly protruding Adam’s Apple got most of the screen time. It’s a good thing there were no love scenes involving him, because it’s just possible someone could lose an eye. I couldn’t stand the requisite ghost girl in the movie, her acting was like a really bad garage sale budget attempt to mimic the spastic creepiness of stuff like Samara in The Ring, only she looked more like a kid playing at “retarded Gollum” over half the time. Other than that, the only person left worth mentioning is Supakson Chaimongkol, which is incredibly hard to spell right. She plays Boom and is, as previously mentioned, super hot, also looks seriously intense which fits her role perfectly.
True story: this dude actually had to have his Adam's Apple removed before they would let him on any planes.
Technical: 1.5/5
I don’t know how this movie, which starts off so awesome and has such promise, can completely squander any forward momentum and not pick up the pace again until almost 20 minutes before the finale. After the initial round of crazy-shooting, blood barfing, razor-eating, head-exploding is done (which all looks pretty good by the way, if not fantastically great), we get a lot of nothing for a long stretch of film that was really wearing on my patience. Boom’s trying to infiltrate the family, I get that, and I get the implication that she put a spell on the oldest son to fall in love with her, now can we please just move on? No? Okay then, but you’re losing points for this . . . losing even more when you give me another Tarantino-esque “time warp” flash-forward (or flash-present?) scene in black and white for no better reason than to look artistic. Helpful hint: if you need to use a device like that to try to keep your movie going and still come out boring, you may want to consider a rewrite.
The gore is pretty good, as I said before, but nothing incredible, with one exception: probably the grossest scene in the movie involves a bunch of live eels apparently bursting out of one character’s stomach and covering the entire floor of his hospital room—as Unreal Tournament would say “Wicked sick!” IMDB comments seem to imply that this was a common thing for Asian horror flicks in the ‘80s, and that may be why it looked so damn grody and cool (practice makes perfect and all). Since I’ve never seen anything like it before, I have to admit to being pretty wowed. The music is weirdly ‘80s, too. Not in an overbearing synthy-way like Demons, but more like it came out of Poltergeist or Friday the 13th. It’s not bad, mind you, but it just seems weirdly outdated to me.
This is actually what I looked like while watching the movie as I sat through the boring middle section.
Popcorn Factor: 2/5
Well, I can’t say I hated it, and I can’t say I loved it either. I wish I could, since that makes for a way more interesting review, but this movie’s kinda just there. The gore’s pretty good, the women are incredibly attractive, but the movie just ambles and shambles during the lengthy middle part. There were also several plot elements that I couldn’t help but feel left out of–like the movie knew what was going on, but I just had to guess. I don’t know if that was a language barrier thing or if it’s just fucked up storytelling, but so many things just leave you hanging in terms of the backstory and making sense of some random weirdness that happens (like the ghost girl–I figured it out now but the movie left me confused about her ’til I had to work it out myself with the dubious help of IMDB). It also felt like a much longer movie than it actually was, which would ordinarily piss me off, but when cool things happened, they were usually REALLY cool, it just didn’t pace itself right. I can’t say I’d recommend this to anyone just because of how long it feels, but it shouldn’t kill you if you decide to give it a try anyway.