Monday, December 14, 2015

Pernicious


Three complaining young American women travel to Thailand to work as teachers, but find they've rented a haunted house in this gory horror film. After a drone shot of the temples at Angkor Wat, the women bicker amongst themselves as they unlock the padlock to the door of their rented home, and the boom mic makes a startling appearance, taking up approximately 10% of the left-hand side of the frame. They keep calling their new home 'creepy', and I think they're confusing the word 'creepy' with 'enormous, beautiful, gorgeously decorated, and much too nice for them'. They discover a gold statue of a child, and the cameraman is reflected in a 'creepy' wood and glass display case that probably cost a small fortune. I mean seriously, this house is incredible. Ornate wooden carvings, a lagoon instead of a yard, shining hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, a haunted ritual altar in the attic, you know, curb appeal.

Anyway, after some continuity-defying carpet and dizzying handheld camerawork, a glass breaks somewhere in this 'creepy' three-story home, and one of the women says, 'It must be the wind', and it's like they're reading from a script from Scooby Doo. Then one of the women says, 'We don't speak Thai', and then speaks Thai.

The women decide to go out on the town, so they head to a nightclub and drink booze from a fishbowl and dance to dubstep. It's very tedious. Three men hit on them, and then the women get roofied.

Here the film takes a really dark turn, and not a moment too soon. People are tortured, someone gets fed their own eyeball, and someone's toenails are ripped out. Teeth are extracted, someone bathes in arterial spray, and someone licks a bloody knife blade. A witch gets her head split open, revealing her twitching brain. Someone's entrails make an appearance, someone's tongue is removed, and there's bad dubbing.

The second half of the film is superior to the first, but it's probably because the first half is concerned with plot and character development. The second half barely succeeds because of the torture and screaming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9lZ_Er-Wjg


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