Review for Phobia

Introduction

I'm not exactly known for my appreciation of the horror genre, and it's why there is a dearth of horror reviews on this site with my name attached. I just can't do that sort of movie justice. But sometimes you can't help the discs that you get to review, and the odd horror movie does turn up from time to time, forlornly looking in my direction for a little love. This last time it was Phobia, which compounded its error by being not one horror movie, but four. The horror anthology is still undead and kicking, the idea of stringing a few short stories together to entertain, spook, and creep out still appeals to filmmakers, and Phobia collects four of Thailand's finest together to bring four decidedly different horror stories to life, in an effort to squeeze something original from a genre that some are beginning to consider stale and redundant. That Thai connection is enough to whet my appetite, as while it's the Hollywood production line that leaves me cold, foreign cinema can often offer up something unexpected and brilliant, and it's a prospect that leads me to give Phobia a chance. If subtitles offend you, just wait a couple of years, I'm sure Hollywood will remake it by then.


The four stories in this anthology are as follows…

Happiness - A young girl is trapped in her apartment; an accident has left her with a cast on her leg, reduced mobility, and no contact with the outside world other than through the Internet, and her mobile phone. So when an unknown caller starts up an SMS conversation with her, it quickly develops into a text-speak friendship. Until she makes the mistake of swapping photos with him.

Tit for Tat - Never get on the wrong side of the son of an undertaker. Bullying poor Ngid backfires when he curses his tormentors. Now the curse is trying to pick them off one by one. Is there any way to cheat fate?


In The Middle - Four friends are on a kayaking holiday, camping in the great outdoors. A tent is the perfect place to swap ghost stories, and spoil movie endings for each other. But when it comes to the subject of the afterlife, master storyteller Aey tells everyone that he'll come back from the dead and haunt whoever sleeps in the middle. The next day, their boat capsizes, and Aey is washed away.

Last Fright - Pim is the stewardess on a very special chartered flight, one that is taking the body of a princess back home. Pim's got a guilty conscience as it is, having wrecked a woman's marriage, and accidentally killed her as well. Being locked in a cabin for hours with a corpse is going to be… interesting.

The Disc

You get a nice, smooth, clear and colourful native PAL transfer, which I would have said was free of ghosting, except that the film is shot digitally, which leaves a certain degree of fuzziness. It works well enough to tell the short stories though, but leaves everything with a low budget feel. In terms of audio, you get DD 2.0, DD 5.1 and DTS Thai soundtracks, with forced English subtitles. The sound is suitably moody and atmospheric, getting the chills across effectively, and there is some nice creepy music when required. The forced subtitles are a pain, not only because you're stuck with them, but also when the badly accented English dialogue in the fourth story appears, there are no subtitles and it really does need them.

Extras

The usual EPK guff is accessible from the nicely animated menus. The Cast and Crew Interviews last 12 minutes, and you get to hear about the idea and the concept behind the anthology, a little about the individual tales from the directors and the actors, and a little behind the scenes footage too. There is a theatrical trailer to cap the disc.

Conclusion

The opening credits are really promising, cool, moody, stylish, with a CGI blood motif that belongs in a much higher budgeted picture. After a credit sequence like the one that Phobia gets, practically anything would be a letdown, and with me not being a fan of horror, you're probably expecting a total slating here. But I loved it. It was great, suspenseful, brilliantly acted, with a slow build up, and nerve tingling climax. It's probably the best horror story I have seen in years, and when the big moment hit, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The problem is that Phobia is an anthology, and that little gush of praise only applies to the first story, Happiness. After that, things started to go downhill.


Happiness is awesome though, brilliantly building on a young woman's isolation and loneliness, effortlessly establishing a sense of claustrophobia, and building a tingling tension of paranoia that is perfectly judged and executed. Tit for Tat on the other hand is Hollywood by the numbers. In the extras you can hear the directors speak about their desire to get away from the glut of identikit horror being produced in Thailand at the minute. I didn't expect them to do this by going west and looking to Final Destination and its sequels for inspiration. Of course there is entertainment value in seeing a series of obnoxious teenagers dying in horrible and varied ways, but the story itself is woefully predictable.


In The Middle is a film that I found more entertaining than I expected, as rather than stick slavishly to the established tropes, it decides to keep its tongue firmly in its cheek, and take an irreverent approach to its subject matter, with something of a knowing wink to the audience. It has that same sort of cheekiness as the Scream films, and other similar post-modern horror flicks, but it doesn't dish out any irony. It's really quite fun. But the film ends on something of a disappointing note for me, as Last Fright was really quite dull and uninspiring, even though the stewardess trapped in an aircraft cabin offers much scope for claustrophobic anxiety. It all seemed rather twee and old fashioned to me.


Phobia is an interesting experiment; a horror anthology that owes more to shows like the Twilight Zone than those horror anthology movies of old, with its four very different flavours of spookiness. Some work, some don't and I expect the ones that do succeed depend very much on the eye of the beholder. Not being a horror fan personally, I'm liable to take this disc with a pinch of salt, but for someone who really appreciates the genre, it will probably be a welcome change from the usual Hollywood clichés. That is except for Tit for Tat, which is a Hollywood cliché!