Movie Review - Voices From The Grave

I like horror movies, always. This is partly because I like being spooked, but the problem is, none of the horror movies I've watched spooked me. They certainly raced my heart a little, but none gave me what I'm thirst of.

Yesterday I watched another Thai horror- Voices from the Grave. Most Thai horror are usually visually disturbing. Many of the horror movies are made using bungled CGI effects or sickening phoney blood.

Well, as usual, the movie starts with a preamble, and then the screen changes into some random places as we watch a lady risking her life doing some stupid things for her job, and then the screen changes again and we see an old guy shooting himself in the head and setting his own mansion on fire. Bla bla bla.

After the mysterious kick-off, we see the lady, supposedly dead, driving a car, and then a phone call notifies her that her father is dead - supposedly dead - in the hospital, but when she goes to the hospital, her father sorts of resurrected. And then the story goes on........

Well, you see, most horror movies are intended to be scary and usually blood is introduced to produce a horror effect. But in this movie, blood is not a tool to spook the audience, but the sound effect and the suspense are.

Before I watched the movie, I knew the movie centres around the matter of life and death, and if the person who is supposed to die does not die, other deaths would not happen, new lives would not be born, and thus the cycle of life would be interrupted.

So, right in the beginning I know the lady is supposed to die, but she doesn't. So I had a good guess about what the story is about. And I hate to say this: the movie is a bit disappointing.

It's the director's intention to deliver horror without any blood, and I have to say, he fails. Either he fails or I'm the only one unaffected by his intention. Even the part that is considered the scariest, the part where the baby is born but then enigmatically 'sucked' back to the mother's body, does not affect me, not even the slightest.

There are quite many things in the movie that are unexplained. For instance, what happened to the guy the protagonist talks to? The guy who got bludgeoned pretty badly and kept in the refrigerator, who did that to him? And how the hell is the killer roaming around Thailand while he's act of killing is already exposed and the police is already searching for him? And is that cop her ex-boyfriend? There seemed to have some chemicals between them.

Maybe they've been explained, maybe I just did not pay attention.

Personally, the movie is a bit of a let-down. I expected more from a Thai horror, but this movie delivers only a little horror that even fails to scare a cockroach from flying.

Maybe the sound effect from the few boys sitting behind me lightened the mood. But still, the horror wasn't there.

The bright side is that the movie doesn't end like other horror movies do. It tells you the ending and you don't need to run your imagination. All the mysteries are answered except one, the one at the very end.

The dark side would be the bungled effects and the predictable plot. If you read the synopsis of the movie prior to the watch, you should be able to conjecture the entire story right from the beginning.

My rating: 3/5.