Phobia

Anthology of four horror stories. Most are only ok. The first one is about a lone girl in her apartment. She's been stuck there for three months while her broken leg heals. She starts getting texts from some guy who wants to come up to her apartment but she doesn't even know him. Plus she's all alone. The second is about the kid who gets bullied to death. The third is the story of the friends who go camping and river-rafting until they lose one of the boys to the river. The last is the story of a stewardess on a plane with one passenger, a princess. They none of them are all that; mostly these are mildly entertaining stories.

The 1st story fell right into my pool of likeliness. Delivering the story without a single dialogue was done well.

2nd story was all right but I really didn't like the editing such as lot of shaky camera, flashes all of a sudden and CGI was not so satisfying. Story and writing was okish.

3rd one felt like a drag to me from the beginning but felt a lot more in the middle, the actors acted wacky in times of fear but the ending was somewhat good or whatever.....

4th in my opinion didn't deliver as much, all could be predictable from the beginning.

what a stupid title... this movie starts off with a surprisingly well done title sequence that uses blood as its main motif... it was elegant.

i was impressed by how great the first 'mini film' was shot. it looked great. The tension was excellent throughout and the almost-total lack of any dialog was interesting and ambitious.

the second 'mini film' is exceedingly bad... the flashy editing was distracting and seemed to be included only to cover the thin script. the "terrifying finale" of the whole thing centers around a horribly executed cgi zombie-looking character. who uses cgi to make zombies?!?! this is the worst of the 4.

the third one was a lame and mildly homo erotic attempt at a 'self-referential' horror movie (in the vein of 'scream' maybe?) not scary, not funny, totally forgettable.

the last one was great! incredibly effective thriller about a flight attendant that has to deal with one of the most terrifying scenarios that i can remember seeing in a movie. it grabs you and doesn't let you go... great acting too by the lead actress.

in closing, you gotta take the good with the bad i guess...

1 is good, 2 is god-awful 3 is bad 4 is great.

There is no such thing as Asian horror. Even though there are plenty of common elements, each country has its own way of dealing with horror films, especially stylistically. 4bia is a new anthology project giving room to four Thai talents. The four stories are ever so slightly related, but stand well on their own and bring their own vision on what Thai horror has to add to the genre.

The first short is directed by Thongkonthun, a relatively fresh director with little experience in the horror genre. His short has a pretty conventional theme, being nothing more than a simple girl, ghost, haunt story. Still, the angle of the short is pretty special, as no actual dialog is being used. The girl is homebound and isolated from her friends and all conversations are held through sms contact. Not a first, as more and more films are trying to integrating digital communication, but still quite a novel experience.

Visually, the short is decent with several attractive shots, though the single setting does get a little boring after a while. We follow he girl in her room for the entire running time, only at the very end do we get some shots from outside. As a whole, the short is convincing enough and even though the story is extremely traditional, the execution makes it worthwhile. It's Thongkonthun's talent that keeps this film well away from falling into the boredom trap. 4* Next up is a short from Shutter director Pisanthanakun. Shutter was a pretty big Asian horror hit, but what Pisanthanakun puts on display here is different and easily the most interesting short of the bunch. The short is shot entirely as if making a trailer, including color bleeds, short freeze frames, hectic cuts and speed fluctuations. A true visual feast, sadly more and more cheap CG creeps in, resulting in a rather horrible and amateurish climax.

For those familiar with the Art of the Devil series, the story will hold little surprises, though the revenge theme of the film has been given a nice swing. The style of the film makes it a little hard to follow, but the basics are clear enough and the short looks really impressive. With a little tweaking on the CG part this would've been perfect, luckily this is easily forgotten when considering the rest of the film. 4.5* Third short is made by Wongpoom, co-director of Shutter. Again someone with some solid experience in the field of horror. And it shows. A completely different short than Pisanthanakun's, Wongpoom's film draws more to the likes of Craven's Scream trilogy. Four guys go rafting together, but when they all end up in the water things take a turn for the worse.

The atmosphere in this film is pretty relaxed, with little to no scares or creeps. To compensate, there's a thin layer of humor running underneath everything that happens, with a rather amusing (but possible frustrating) running gag spoiling the ending of at least three popular horror films (The Sixth Sense, The Others and Shutter), even throwing in Titanic for good measure. There are some genuinely funny moments, though I assume it's not as fun if you haven't seen the mentioned films yet. Visually a little underdeveloped, but since the focus lies on the humor that's easily ignored. 4* Sadly, the final short is the least interesting of the bunch. Even though none of the shorts bring something new to the table story-wise, they all have some interesting points of execution. Purikitpanya is the only one delivering a pretty standard horror fare, with a dead body haunting a stewardess on her flight home.

Purikitpanya shows a keen eye for composition from time to time, and the introduction of the princess (who ends up in the body bag) is pretty fun, but from that point on the short brings nothing but a bag of horror clichés. Purikitpanya's sense of style keeps it going until the end, but people who've seen their fair share of Asian horror films might be a little bored by the end of it. 3* All in all, the film presents four fun horror shorts, none of them below average, three of them come up with interesting elements. Thai horror is doing well for itself, and even though it's not quite yet ready to battle the better horror films coming from China and Japan, there's some real talent hidden away in here. A fun film for horror adepts looking for something outside the typical horror offerings. 4.0*/5.0*

I enjoyed this film very much despite having limited expectations. Each of the four segments plays out smoothly with few cheap scares and reasonably coherent plot development. That said, none of the chapters are particularly scary and it's all stuff we've seen before. What set it apart for me was the wry ingenuity of Man in the Middle and one small detail in The Last Flight - at one stage when the stewardess is serving the Princess, sunlight reflection from the aeroplane window moves slowly across the bulkhead behind as if the plane is banking. A nice touch. I can overlook that the galley interior is of a much larger plane than the 737 portrayed externally :-).