What is it about Asia? You can go on TV and do anything no matter how dangerous and life threatening it is but here in Britain if you so much as bump your nose there is a formal enquiry. So whilst we watch Big Brother, a ghastly painted house full to the brim with ten freaks of society who do nothing but sit around all day, the Cambodians get a scary reality show where contestants are sent to haunted places with seriously angry ghosts. Eleven contestants and £75k up for grabs, not bad odds of winning - all you have to do is stick it out to the end, it’s just a shame that it’s pretty scary in the remains of a prison where mass genocide took place.
Comrade Jium a fascist separatist leader took control of Camp 17 and sadistically murdered all government military staff and then went on capture and murder over ten thousand of the islands inhabitants. A few years later it is decided to turn the prison remains into a memorial museum, but work stopped when staff suddenly and mysteriously died on the anniversary of the massacre. So now no one dare go near Camp 17, well unless you’re a television company who wants to fit the place with cameras and film a reality TV show that is.
So with just a few days to go before another anniversary of the killings, it’s time to get some young kids in there ready to scare themselves silly and raise audience numbers. Things start to go wrong right at the very beginning when the priest hired to perform a good luck prayer seems to become possessed and warns everyone that they are in great danger, a few of the contestants believe that this is just a setup by the TV company but we see that they themselves seem surprised by the priests activities when the shot switches to the men in the direction suite...Coincidence? Maybe!
Even before the ghost inducing challenges are started a few of the contestants experience some ghostly activity and it doesn’t take long for the weaker contestants are too scared to stay in the game. Even the disappearance of one of the contestants doesn’t stop the show from progressing and on the eve of the anniversary they are instructed by the director to enter the dungeons (where most of the killing took place) and perform tasks designed to enrage the spirits, thereby showing themselves. I don’t know about you but if I was a ghost and saw someone was smashing a load of my murdered mate’s skulls, I’d be pretty pissed off and be willing to scare the shit out of some wimpy TV show stars.
I really do recommend this movie to horror flick lovers, the story is compelling, the acting very good and with plenty of ‘jump out of your armchair’ moments and some gruesome scenes there is more than enough to satisfy. The movie is very dark too; not exactly black and white, more dark shades of yellow, brown and green. Before I forget I should tell you that the spoken dialogue isn’t actually in English. Don’t fear though, the subtitles are well written and don’t interfere with the story or movie itself. In some ways I believe it adds to the realism, after all it wouldn’t be very likely that Thai people living in Asia would natively be speaking English all day would it? No wonder we are having problems worldwide with foreign acceptance and integration when we portray everyone as young, trendy, good looking and English speaking. Comes as a bit of a shock to the system when we go abroad and find out they’re just as ugly as us, don’t speak our language and D’oh, we didn’t bother to bring our translation dictionary.
A good scary foreign movie, think The Grudge meets Big Brother with a dashing of Most Haunted thrown in for good measure.