Bangkok Haunted (2001)

Director: Oxide Pang and Pisut Praesangeam

Screenplay: Pisut Praesangeam and Sompop Wetchapipat

Cast: Pimsiree Pimsee as Paga / Jieb, Dawan Singha-Wee as Pan, Kalyanut Sriboonrueng as Kanya, Pete Thongchua as Nop

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A horror anthology from Thailand, Bangkok Haunted however does something very different in not having the wraparound start the feature, but immediately lunging into the first of three stories, so let us begin as such too. An ancient drum, for the first story, is being transferred in a truck. It is established to have a ghost woman haunting the instrument as the man watching the items in the back is more concerned of leaping out at speed onto the road to get away. The young woman that receives this drum, Jieb (Pimsiree Pimsee), is going to have to deal with the haunted consequences.

We see the drum's origins in 1917, as it is connected to an adopted girl whose parents died of sickness and whose adoptive father is a scholar of music. Raised to become a dancer, Paga (also played Pimsee) befriends another child, a disfigured and ostracised one, who when they become adults is infatuated with her despite Paga only views him as a brother whilst loving another man. This is the most conventional of the three stories in plotting, yet allowed enough space to breathe as Jieb in the modern day with an older male scholar, wandering into flashbacks in the past within her dreams without warning, realise something is amiss with the drum and research its past. It seems like a critique, for a forty four minute segment, that I will not write a lot about this segment beyond this, but it starts with a sound opening for the entire project by co-director Oxide Pang. Oxide Pang with his twin brother Danny came into prominence by the 2000s for films that caught the "Tartan Asian Extreme" wave of interest in the West for Asian genre cinema. Born in Hong Kong, they have juggled genres, action with Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and its 2008 remake with Nicolas Cage, alongside the original 2002 version of The Eye, a horror film about a woman who sees ghosts as a blind woman who was given her sight back through a donor's set of eyes. Their work outside the director's chair deserves credit too as Danny Pang was the editor on the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-3), the first one of the many films from the East which caught on fire with interest for Western film fans. They have worked together as brothers but also separately, Oxide Pang making this film instead with Pisut Praesangeam, a Thai filmmaker/producer/screenwriter in the latter's home country, setting this anthology within Bangkok.

The first segment is the pair's most traditional anthology story in tone, one which does provide an appropriately macabre twist - [Spoiler Warning] one of Paga's arms was inside the drum and we learn how it got there [Spoilers End] - and feels the perfect length for its micro-feature tone by itself. After this, Bangkok Haunted's stories are more idiosyncratic in their structures. Probably the biggest virtue, for a film for whatever inexplicable reason I hated when I first saw it, likely due to its slow burn pace, is that all three segments are distinct. Even if the next two as tales entirely set in the modern urban landscape of Bangkok, those two managed to stand out from each other in tone, and since the entire feature is over two hours long and lets them all feel like micro-features, there is no sense of rushing plot points or losing their individual moods either. The wraparound, whilst with a spooky gotcha in the final shot, is not really a story but I still liked it, especially as it feels more like a nice wrapping that does not need to have a dynamic build. It is a curveball when that, only after a forty four minute tale, we have it established three female friends are telling scary stories in a cafe, with them critiquing plot logic or trying to figure out cool titles for each other's stories. It is actually a cool twist on the horror anthology tone to not have a twist, just a trio of interesting story tellers who are friends and engaging with each other.

Story two could be said to be too convoluted and weird for its own good, but it is weird for me as much in a good way. The mature tale of the three, with its explicit nudity and grotesqueness, it is about an essence called Phy Essence. The segment is almost out of order in explaining the plot details, which is why it could be extremely confusing, but as for our female lead, the Phy Essence is a love potion which you can buy hush hush, here in a funny moment in a sex shop where a male customer complains the porn tape he has rented is too damaged at the best parts. The essence is seen once slipped into a man's drink, but is a McGuffin, not really explained but designed to make men fall inescapably in love with the woman who uses it.

The essence, as established in the first scene in a hospital morgue with necrophilia overtones, is collected by one guy who finds recently dead and beautiful female corpses, and is made from the blood collected from their slit open necks. It is a task he secretly gets on with even if he is in danger of being caught, or finds a male colleague getting drunk on the shift and sleeping under a blanket on one of the gurneys among the corpses. That we see the corpses occasionally open their eyes or move their hands suggests that the Phy Essence has ill advised magical aspects too, more so as there is a ghost woman looming about, and that with one of the male suitors, you see the harmful effects of the essence. Not only does he effectively sleep with both a living and dead woman at the same time on a one night stand, but ends up first puking up for the initial symptoms, only to be at death's door with a Buddhist priest trying to help him. Another will be killed by a car and immediately come back as a ghost due to the essence, and it is clear the magic behind it has dangerous properties alongside the gristly nature of the concoction just making the dead angry and come back to haunt those involved in using it.

It is a very idiosyncratic story, probably more vague then it itself realises, very erotic and sexually explicit in a way that it is quite striking with time passing, be it the humour of the lead living next door to a couple in an apartment who are too loud in their passions, or the necrophilia aspects at the morgue. We had some transgressive films from this early 2000s wave that dealt with sexuality - like Takeshi Miike from Japan and the late Kim Ki-duk from South Korea, the later sadly someone we have to put a caveat around due to sexual misconduct allegations - but sexuality was not really as prominent in this era of violence, of action and genre films which did not really tackle those subjects, or the trend for ghost stories influenced from Asian filmmakers modernising them, only to get remade as American films that same decade. You can make the argument this is erotic for the sake of titillation, not for profoundness, but at the same time, you also have a story where despite this women are central to the plot, which is striking within itself. It is effectively a moral tale of women stuck in the position of needing the Phy Essence, because they feel they need to go out into night clubs for men to date, with the essence whose gift is too dangerous. It is a tale when even men who die from its effect become ghosts too, leading to a haunting here where those made to love a woman will do so even if, in one of the best shots of the whole film, they live together in physical embrace after her death in the same grave. With its very electronic, New Age tinged music, it has for all its all-over-the-place plotting a distinct tone that I appreciated, effectively a cousin to a segment for the Three Extremes (2004) anthology, which was expanded into a 2004 feature film by itself, a work directed by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan called Dumplings. Three... Extremes leant into the growing interest in Asian cinema at the time with three directors from three different countries - Fruit Chan from Hong Kong and known for films like Made in Hong Kong (1997), Takashi Miike from Japan, and one of the biggest figures to gain prominent and his career grown from this trend, Park-Chan Wook from South Korea. Dumplings itself in either its versions was explicitly about the theme I feel the Phy Essence is about, the idea of women forced to follow gendered conventions, in that case to stay youthful in a world when men's eyes wander to younger women, through the very twisted concept of Chinese dumplings made with human foetuses. Whilst Bangkok Haunted's own tale of ill advised love charms is stranger, they make a fascinating pair on the cursed love remedies from the perspectives of women if you have a strong stomach for one of the pair mentioned.

Story three begins with a scene of a crime, where a woman has hung herself in a warehouse. The police office on the case suspects it was not a suicide but a murder, believing there was no way for her to get up to where she was found alongside evidence of a struggle beforehand. Whilst the police chief refuses to press on with this idea, he investigates on his own terms, and the coroner cements his concerns when there are suspicious clues complicating her death. This is interesting as a crime mystery steeped in the supernatural; when a scene transpires when a random couple following him swear they saw a woman trying to get out of the moving vehicle, it is clear he is now haunted by her too. All three stories involve ghostly women wronged, and that really becomes apparent for this tale of a horrible series of circumstances for its one innocent, the woman herself.

Whilst in dire need of a high definition re-release, it is by this segment I came to appreciate Bangkok Haunted's general washed out and dingy aesthetic with moments of subtle colour. Even though one of the tales is partially set in 1917, with significantly more colour in the forest locations, this film really emphasises the idea of the back alleys and dark night streets of Bangkok throughout itself. With there being a second scene in this segment within a sex shop, as the lead makes enquiries on the woman leading to her husband, it is very atmospheric in imagining these ghosts drifting among the living in these cramped environments, the places not seen as idyllic and grungy but the real world for normal people stuck in crammed apartments trying to find ways to get on in life. They are not disconnected from the living either, which makes this aesthetic more appropriate, as it leads to suspicion of domestic abuse from her husband, seemingly changed and wheelchair bound from a car crash. The key to the segment from here is a series of red herrings, including a male lover of hers who is a boss at a construction site, where the many men in her life are not good people. This includes the lead himself who is revealed to have been part of it too. There is a sick humour as more people are revealed to be innocent when information is learnt when it is too late, including unfortunate deaths of suspects, and one of the best turns when someone's innocence is proven but through his involvement for another crime of political corruption. One twist comes fully from a murder mystery pot boiler - [Huge Spoiler] with the help of ice to be able to reach a hanging spot [Spoilers End] - and ultimately not even our white knight lead is a good man, just finding excuses to purge his own guilt from the things he did to the woman.

The story has many trigger warnings as already brought up and also revealed, including a deliberate miscarriage with a coat hanger that is not comfortable to witness without being tasteless. They lead to this being the saddest tale of the three about a woman who did not deserve her lot, whose affairs were clearly to escape her misery, and whose fate leaves her a ghost watching those involved discover their own complicity and fall off the rails. It is a perfect conclusion to a trio of stories I unfairly dismissed in my youth, and I have absolute respect for the entire project, with three strong entries, being a very good horror anthology which took risks, be it telling a traditional ghost story, being very weird and sexual, and for this one to actually force one to sympathise for its female lead in its uncomfortable nods to how bad human beings can be to each other.