kwietman

In Art of the Devil 2, which is not a sequel in any traditional sense of the word, the Seven Ronin team of directors delve into another exploration of Thai witchcraft, which apparently shares little with its Western counterpart. In this movie, as in the first, the object is revenge, the tools are those of black magic, and the price is sanity. The witchcraft of these movies is messy, deadly, and the cost to the practitioner is as great as to the victim. Six students visit the remote home of a former teacher, who is also the stepmother of one of the youths. Death and blood follow as the young people learn that their actions, as a group and as individuals, have marked them for vengeance. Art of the Devil 2 is related to the first only by the theme of Thai curses, which are by far more imaginative than anything brought to the American screen. There are weaknesses, such as the quality of the translation track and the cheap effect, but the movie succeeds by imagining a world in which dangerous curses can kill from a distance, where witches can appear and disappear at will, in which the dead dance silently just out of sight of everyone but you, and in which the cost of revenge is the soul of the wronged. This is not gentle stuff; cannibalism, corpse mutilation and bloody rituals are abundant, but on the whole the picture succeeds in doing something not seen from American directors in many years.