Description

Ah, the glories of frosh week. The parties, the hazings, the gangs of upperclassmen exulting in their new-found power over the lowly freshmen. But for the students in extreme Thai horror flick Scared, survival is more the order of the day than sex. Though it sets up like a teen sex romp, with scores of pretty young things making eyes at each other, Scared soon takes a much darker turn. As part of orientation week the upperclassmen have organized a weekend trip into a remote forest, a trip that appears to be stymied when a park ranger turns them aside due to inclement weather. Discouraged and angry, one bus turns back while the other agrees to take on a strange local man as a guide after he promises to show them an alternate route, a route that involves taking the bus over a narrow, rickety bridge. The bridge collapses in spectacular fashion, blood begins to flow, and the surviving students are stranded in an ominous forest with no way of sending word that they need help.

Thailand is a nation with an odd relationship to its film industry. They have no ratings system whatsoever, while enforcement of strict rules against certain on-screen behaviors – nudity, smoking and certain types of gun play being the most prominent – are left to local police forces, a system that breeds inconsistency and frustration. It has also resulted in exactly the sort of arbitrary and capricious rules that filmmakers love to manipulate and exploit – witness the black and green blood in every zombie and alien film ever made, and the de-colourized sequences of Kill Bill, intended to skirt MPAA rules that state blood must be red to count against you in the ratings – and while there are rules against holding a gun to someone’s head in Thai films, there are obviously not any such rules against ramming a sharpened stake through that same head, a fact that the makers of Scared have gleefully seized upon. If you can think of any possible situation that may result in a piece of wood being forcibly rammed through a person’s body, it is very likely in this film. Forest death traps drop from above, long falls end on sharp stakes, the aforementioned bridge shatters with such force that lumber pokes through flesh like a hot wire through butter. And thanks to the riches that production company Baa-Ram-Ewe brought in from the international success of Ong Bak, the whole gory affair is buffed up to a high sheen.

—Todd Brown

"Some of the deaths are outrageously inventive" – Russell Edwards, VARIETY.COM

Website

http://www.scaredthemovie.com

Credits

Director: Pakpoom Wongjinda
Screenplay: Pakpoom Wongjinda
Cast: Borwonpot Jaiganta, Napapa Tantakul, Chitjun Fujipun, Amornpun Gongtrakan
Producers: Prachya Pinkaew, Sukanya Wongstapat
Distributor: Golden Network