IFFR 2009: 4BIA Review (and Hong Kong R3 DVD review too...)

Welcome to the new economy: no sooner have I seen horror anthology "4BIA" (aka. "Phobia") at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, or the DVD lands on my doorstep on the very same day!

And glad I am, for this was a great crowdpleaser of a movie...

Normally I just plunk in a few screenshots I deem to be handsome without any order whatsoever, but this time I've done it a little differently.
The shots are grouped by chapter, and the chapters are divided by thick the thick red bars. And they follow the same order as in "The Stories" below, so we start with "Happiness" etcetera.


4BIA consists of 4 stories, and here they are:

"Happiness".
Housebound because of a broken leg, a bored girl starts to chat with some stranger, using text messages on her mobile phone. After a few days the messages go from cute, to unsettling, to downright menacing. With her phone starting to act increasingly weird, the girl starts to wonder whether her mystery "friend" is actually still human or not. Soon, panic sets in when he announces he will come visit...

"Tit for Tat".
A bunch of teenage thugs abuse a boy they suspect of being responsible for them being expelled from school. The boy retaliates with black magic, but quickly the curse grows more powerful than he can manage which leads to very gory results.

"In the Middle".
Four friends are on a trip through the jungle, camping and canoing. One of them jokingly says he'll haunt the rest if he dies (starting with the one "in the middle"), but after a terrible accident on the river the group lose track of him. When he returns a few hours later, the others aren't sure whether he is real or a ghost come back to haunt them.

"Last Fright".
A stewardess is having an affair with a prince, but when she accompanies the man's wife on a private flight the trip turns out to be a worst case scenario. The princess acts like a diva and drops veiled threats about people being sentenced to death for adultery. The two start to pester each other more and more until the stewardess messes with the food of the princess, fatally poisoning her by accident. On the return flight the stewardess has to accompany the corpse, but when both are left alone in the Business Class odd things start to happen.


The Movies:

Wow, this is one polished production. Horror (and especially horror from South-East Asia) is so often a low budget affair that this came as a surprise to me, but a pleasant one it is. From the splendid and very creative opening credits onward this picture positively glows with the care and attention that has been lavished on it. Even a totally superfluous car accident is filmed with attention and flair.
The compositions and slow pans of "Happiness", the natural friendly bantering amongst teenagers in "In the Middle", the almost laughably flashy camera-moves of "Tit for Tat", the dare-you-to-blink staring matches between the two divas in "Last Fright"... each segment has a few moments which stand out as splendid craftsmanship.

The "Happiness" segment looks gorgeous. Director Yongyoot Thongkongtoon has the whole story taking place in a single apartment but it never feels cramped, except during the eerie finale. His segment also provides the biggest jumpscare of the whole anthology and the buildup is straight by the books.

The "Tit for Tat" segment has the most distinctive style, with director Paween Purijitpanya cramming a storyline fit for 90 minutes into a 25 minute segment. No trick is left unused: cameras run circles around people in mid-fall, crazy colors, crazy angles and machine-gun editing are prevalent. This looks like a fast-forwarded MTV-version of "Final Destination" until the end, which suddenly turns a lot quieter. Well, bar the legion of cgi ghosts which appears at that point...

And then there is "In the Middle". Make no mistake: this story is as mean as the first two but the interaction between the four boys is so spot-on that you get to live this segment with them, the scares but also the silly jokes. After all the dread in the previous segments, the humorous bits in "In the Middle" where very welcome indeed and the audience had a few big laughs here. Anyone who has been camping and felt, you know, uncomfortable leaving the tent at night to go to the bathroom, will find plenty to recognize here! Even when the scares start the interactions between these guys are worthy of a few giggles. This was by FAR the most enjoyable segment of the four, and I'm very interested in what Banjong Pisanthanakun will do next.

Finally there is "Last Fright", like "Happiness" a very straightforward ghost story but the character play is very well done. Director Parkpoom Wongpoon of "Shutter" and "Alone" fame milks the story for what it's worth and succeeds, except at the very end which feels like it misses a bit of extra punch. Odd, because the story seems to lead up to one.
A friend of mine summed up this segment as "Not as good as the others but the lead actress is an incredible babe!". That would be Chermarn Boonyasak who is indeed beautiful, but thankfully she can act too. Her beauty is even required for the plot: how else would she be able to seduce a prince?

And Chermarn Boonyasak is not the only one who shines here: acting across the board is great. "Happiness" depends strongly on the believability of its lead and she succeeds admirably. And the cast of "In the Middle" may consist of a collection of teen idols, but they showed great chemistry and I wasn't pulled out of the story in the least.

Conclusions:

Like horror? Watch this.
Like anthologies? Watch this if you can stomach horror.
Like horror anthologies? What the hell are you waiting for!

"4BIA" is an unapologetic crowd pleaser of a movie, and the best of its kind I have seen since "Three" and "Three: Extreme". A good-looking film with plenty of hardcore scares and one unexpectedly funny segment as well, this film comes highly recommended.

The audience in Rotterdam was jumping and laughing at the right times, awarding the film a deserved 4.0 out of 5.


On to the DVD:

International distribution being as it is, the day this was playing in Rotterdam was also the day this title was delivered to my mailbox. This version is the Hong Kong Region 3 disc from Panasia, which (warning!) for a change is REALLY region three instead of region-free.

I was pleasantly surprised with the movie, but also with the disc as this is one of the best single DVDs I've ever seen. Audio and video on my television looked very, very good indeed, showing the glossy production seemingly without any loss of quality at all.
And my computer seemed to corroborate this until I started taking screenshots. Thailand is a PAL country, Hong Kong an NTCS one. This disc is a standards-conversion and has brought a disease with it: severe combing. Ouch.
A shame, really, as the few frames that are uncombed are nothing short of magnificent. Colors and contrast are excellent and the picture is very sharp. And let's face it: most people will never notice the combing (chances are the many filters in your hardware will probably take care of it anyway, which is why I didn't see it on playthrough) so it's not a dealbreaker.

Next are the extras, which are nice and quite plentiful for a one-disc edition. Better yet: bar the music video, all of these have English subs.
First there is a two-minute promo fluff-piece announcing the film's premiere, and four making-of documentaries: one for each segment. These are fairly short (about 2 minutes each) and are obviously made by the marketing department but they're better than most similar "featurettes" I've seen for other films. Each contains a few interesting snippets.

But then we move on to the deleted scenes and these are very good indeed. There is more than 20 minutes of materials here, and sometimes the footage is not a deleted scene but an alternate take. The current ending of "Happiness" has the meanest jump-moment of the whole movie, but the deleted scenes show the original ending which was much more subdued and more to my liking (I'm not a masochist, OK? Sue me). The deleted scenes from "Tit for Tat" actually tighten and clarify bits of the story and should have been kept in. And the alternate take from "Last Fright" has a scene take place in a different location, which makes a lot more sense.
In short, these scenes are interesting and welcome additions to this disc.

The last extras concern a music video and the trailer. Nice.

This is a stellar disc for a good movie, and from one of the cheaper regions of the world. Very highly recommended, but note that it's region 3 locked so you might need a regionfree DVD-player.