4Bia

4Bia (pronounced phobia) is a thai horror film that comprises a bunch of short stories. Naturally, it's to be expected that the films are uniformly freaky and really quite scary. If anything, the images of the ghouls will stay with the viewer for quite some time to come. I know they stay with me. Still trying to banish these. I'll succeed...eventually.

I noted with some amusement at their skillful manipulation of the storylines such that they needed a minimal cast to pull it off. Unfortunately, it's not quite a narrative masterpiece, or even particularly innovative. The short stories make extensive use of really ghoulish makeup for the spooks, traditional in-your-face-with-loud-sound scare tactics and Stephen King'esque twisting of the real and the hallucination. That, and the bad CGI in a particular story. In fact, the narratives seemed quite disjointed due to the short story presentation, though there were efforts to tie things in by subtle details like newspaper headlines and references to the other stories. The use of deus ex for some scenes was disturbing, too. I can get it that supernatural events lead to really unusual goings on, but in a cinema narrative it really just seems that they cooked up a supernatural reason for some things to happen, without introducing the props first. That just makes things look unplanned. Sometimes, it also helps not to explicate overly much of the gory details, since at times the imagination can cook up far greater and more realistic horrors than any low budget CGI work possibly could.

To be fair to the film, I guess the rating would have to be spread over two areas. As a film, I don't think it deserves to have more than 6/10. However, I would highly rate the horror value of it, including the very progressive and inexorable build up towards the horror climax. For that, and its gruesome ghosts...I'd give it a very nice 9/10