Ghost Game (2006)

 

Director: Sarawut Wichiensarn

Screenplay: Damkeng Thitapiyasak

Cast: Pachornpol Jantieng as Yut; Thanyanan Mahapirun as Jay; Phongsak Rattanapong as Kemtis; Supatsiri Patomnupong as Dao

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #235

 

I wish I could elaborate on the Thai horror film Ghost Game in a great deal, but this will be a short review. It does have the distinction, though the anticipation has now become disappointment, of being something where an advert caught my eye in my youth, and it has taken years to finally see. When DVD review magazines were once a thing, a prolific thing I collected, an advertisement for the Cine-Asia release of this proclaiming it one of the most controversial films ever made caught my attention.

The actual controversy is far more fascinating than the film itself in terms of exploitation filmmaking. In the narrative, the film is set up as a reality television show where contestants have to stay within an abandoned and seemingly haunted prison for a cash prize. The choice of location is a prison where a militaristic group tortured and killed many people until the leader decided that everyone including himself should die on his choice, leaving it a place very quickly established to be haunted by real and hostile ghosts. There is a real location this setting evokes, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In what is arguably a very tasteless idea by the production, the producers actually wanted to shoot in this location, a place where the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot members of the ruling Communist Party of Cambodia between 1975-1979, did commit real torture and murder in what was a secondary school they rechristened Security Prison 21.

That Ghost Game's location is called S-11 is close to "S-21", the abbreviation of the real place, does really emphasis what a provocative decision it was to make this film. The real museum is rumoured to be haunted by its dead¹, and even then, they do have skulls of victims on location, including a map of Cambodia created with them, as the film has graves and skulls of victims in its fictional setting. Personally, Ghost Game is not defendable, especially when the film is ultimately bland. They were refused, for understandable reason by the Cambodian government, from shooting in the real museum, and had to shot back in Thailand². The film was understandably banned in Cambodia³; even if personally banning a film even if it offends a country is not a personal belief of mine, this was a really insensitive case of copying another culture's real trauma for a film not really interested in tackling the subject, so I can understand even as someone anti-censorship why a country would not want their real tragedy, which scars the present still for many, exploited like this.

The film itself really only needs to be talked about in an abbreviated form, a worse case of how more tasteless it was as I cannot really find anything really to write of, even if it had willingly dared to be provocative and offensive on purpose. The idea of exploiting real crime in reality television and it haunting the present is worth tackling as a premise, baring the fact that here it is bland. The film from the get-go shows its hand quickly that the ghosts are real, but there is no further dynamic progression or questioning of its backdrop for hundred minutes. The stand-in for the real torturers and killers under Pol Pot is a generic evil general, reducing a real and palpably horrible reality to a caricature you barely see.

There are too many characters, only disguisable even when having to wear prison clothes by their archetypes and appearances. None of them have enough to them to stand out, to the point that even who is mean to be the female lead is a vague figure that only stands out later on. There is an aspect of the production having moles in the competitors to try to cause disruption, but that is barely dealt with. Beyond this there is not a lot I desire to talk of. Characters get scared and eventually die, and Ghost Game drags along. Shot in a stark realistic aesthetic, it never really stands out, and the only moment of levity, even before getting to the prison, is a cameo by a Doraemon keychain, an insanely popular Japanese creation who popular in other Asian cultures as well. He turns out not to be a good enough talisman to save these people nor in his blue smiling form to help this film as it went either. History will find the notoriety of its production a curious bookmark, but this is not a film even for offensiveness of a huge degree or compelling badness to mark out as someone to remember in horror cinema history. It is competently made, with a bleak ending where no one rightly wins, but it is efficient without anything to work with, making it a worse film arguably than a tasteless piece of schlock on the subject, or a Mou Tun Fei-like piece like Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995), where historical atrocity is depicted in a lurid tone. Thus as well, this makes the production's attempted idea for a catching premise much more offensive.

 

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1) Such as described HERE.

2) Such as described HERE.

3) As referred HERE