Pernicious

Pernicious starts off like a rather naff TVM. Three models (supposedly teachers) rent a house in Thailand and experience some weird goings on, before shrugging them off and going shopping/clubbing. This pretty much continues for a good part of the film before they can ignore it no longer.

Actually the above précis makes it sound more interesting than it really is. There is no real script or acting to speak of, just by the numbers progression. I thought for a moment the film was dubbed because some parts have badly out of synch speech. After every trauma they remain immaculately presented, with not a hair out of place, and strangely unmoved by their experience.

There are a few scenes of Herschell Gordon Lewis style camp ultraviolence, which although obviously fake, is the only redeeming feature of the film. However, they jar with the pedestrian pace and made-for-TV style nature of the rest of the film.

Overall, although not terrible, you need to be seriously bored to bother with this one.

i watched it because the movie poster boasts some respectable endorsements. Then the movie starts... its all downhill from here. wait its in digital.. a HDcam movie. As soon as the opening starts, you feel kinda nauseous. Something felt amiss. It doesn't feel normal. Not movie like. The amateurish camera angle gave it away. Amateurish editing inter-cutting with the drone cam really shows that this guy doesn't know his stuff. BTW, the overhead shot really sucks. The opening scenes where you see the actresses talking without audio should really tell you of what is to come. Its like someone forgets to record the sound. The movie really got worst. I could not get past the first 8 minute. Felt sorry for the actresses for believing in the director.

The American Alex (Ciara Hanna), Julia (Emily O'Brien) and Rachel (Jackie Moore) travel to Thailand to a voluntary work and they lodge in an isolated house where they find a golden statue of a girl. They meet three British guys and bring them to the house for one-night stand and they have a dreadful nightmare with them. In the morning, they find that they have been stolen and the guys have gone missing with their jewels and the golden statue. Soon they meet a witch that tells a story about abused children called Kumari that return as a revengeful ghost. Further, they find that they are in danger.

"Pernicious" is an awful movie with terrible story, characters and performances. I was lured by the fake reviews in IMDb and wasted my time watching this film. The characters are detestable with their arrogance and stupidity with the exception of Julia and in the end I was expecting for their soonest death to end the film. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): Not available

"Pernicious" is a bad film in many ways. However, I cannot just dismiss it because it also, at times, shows a lot of promise-- especially since the director/writer, James Cullen Bressack, is so young and seems to have potential. It's a shame, with a bit of retooling it could be an exceptional horror story.

The film is about three incredibly smokin' hot women who inexplicably land in Thailand to work with underprivileged children!! I say inexplicably because the three look and act just like they are in a Spring Break sex romp and show many of the classic stereotypes. True to the types, they are mostly concerned with getting drunk and getting laid...which makes the entire working to teach poor children angle totally laughable. Had the film simply had them be three hot and terribly spoiled ladies (which they were) but without the silly children aspect, it sure would have made a lot more sense! As it was, this is how the movie started and I was immediately turned off.

What came next was also terrible. The three pick up three sleazy guys and it appears that the film is going to be a nudie picture. Surprisingly, it doesn't go there at all--and what follows is just god-awful. The three ladies torture and murder the men. This alone is not the problem--it did work with the plot that follows. But the scenes were often way too vivid and just plain nasty. I don't enjoy seeing folks' teeth getting knocked out nor their eyes shoved into their mouths! Call me a prude if you like, but at the very least, this sort of thing sure seems to lack subtlety!!

Had I not been asked to review the film, I am sure I would have stopped watching long before all this. Amazingly, however, despite thoroughly hating the film so far, the last half actually shocked me because it was quite good. The sense of horror and foreboding in the film was excellent and the back story about the Kumari* was weird but unique. I almost wish they'd redo parts of the first half of the film and then release it--making the ladies just stupid and vacuous instead of social workers as well as cutting a few of the more revolting torture scenes. It wasn't even because all the killing was that believable--but it was just unnecessary-- especially when the film otherwise did a great job of setting the mood without all the over the top gore.

*If you care, the Kumari is a real sort of thing from Buddhism but is from Nepal and does NOT involve murder and gore. Look it up sometime if you are curious.

Three American fitties, Alex, Julia and Rachel (Ciara Hanna, Emily O'Brien and Jackie Moore), travel to Thailand in order to teach English to children (and to pick up sleazy British guys in bars for casual sex), but find themselves menaced by a Kumari, the vengeful spirit of a young girl who was sacrificed in a bloody ritual.

Borrowing heavily from post-millennial horror hits The Grudge and Hostel, James Cullen Bressack's Pernicious is a wholly unoriginal torture porn/creepy girl ghost story that tests the patience from the word go. Its three central girls might look great in a pair of tiny shorts, but they're unsympathetic characters, behaving in an irresponsible manner that is bound to end badly; the torture element is suitably nasty with fine gore effects by Jerami Cruise, but it's nothing we haven't seen many, many times before; and the supernatural scenes are totally predictable and scare free, supposedly nail-biting moments including the old 'it's under the duvet' trick and the tried-and-tested 'bathroom mirror reveal' (yawn!).

Just about bearable thanks to the lovely ladies (alas, no nudity!) and the gore (best bit being the shot of a pulsating brain in an old woman's crushed skull), but don't expect Pernicious to deliver anything remotely original.