Once you've seen a few Asian horror films you begin to notice patterns emerging, most galling is that often the main horror element is a placid-looking girl in a white dress with long straight black hair, who lost her life in some unjust way but has come back to haunt either randoms or somehow-related peoples.
The Ring, The Grudge, Tale of Two Sisters, a few more I've now forgotten about, and add Shutter to this list too.
I was still happy to go with it if the pic was well-made, with some good scares and uneasy moments, but to be honest the scares are very standard predictable jump fare: increase in tense music -> protagonist looking uneasy -> loud bang accompanying a brief flash of zombiefied Asian girl (in a white dress).
The narrative jumps about quite randomly in ways that only make sense at the end of the film, and it's the end which saves this from being a poor experience. It's not quite on the high-end dread level as the climax of an otherwise quite dull Ringu (6/10) but it's spooky enough to be satisfying. On the other hand the ending reveal also made me chuckle a little, so not exactly scary.
The two main female actors are also very average, with the male character being an utterly pathetic figure: it's not quite clear how he was written, but I just wanted to punch him in the face.
Generally there's nothing memorable on offer here, tho' there could've been: the idea of polaroids showing us apparitions is a potentially fantastic concept, covered effectively by the Fatal Frame (Project Zero) series of games on the Playstation 2 console, which was very likely the source of inspiration for Shutter (tho' the game I believe used Camera Obscura). Speaking of Fatal Frame, a film was made last year, but seems very obscure:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3684484/
Back to Shutter: to be fair there is one nice scene which stands out: the photo-flip series showing the apparition moving towards something. Again it could've been so much more: if you've seen Paranormal Activity 4 and always thought they didn't maximise the potential of those X-Box Kinect lighting scenes, then you'll be thinking similar here.
Regarding the language: as ever, you should watch a film with its original audio as long as subs are available. The beginning is almost impossible to keep up with the quick-fire banter, but shortly afterwards it's fine. Thai sometimes has Korean-ish inflections, but mostly reminds you (if you, like me, have never heard Thai before) of Vietnamese.
Worth a watch if you're addicted to typical Asian horror and are interested in how Thailand does it.
Not worth your time if you're a horror fan looking for unique scares or original story.
The Ring, The Grudge, Tale of Two Sisters, a few more I've now forgotten about, and add Shutter to this list too.
I was still happy to go with it if the pic was well-made, with some good scares and uneasy moments, but to be honest the scares are very standard predictable jump fare: increase in tense music -> protagonist looking uneasy -> loud bang accompanying a brief flash of zombiefied Asian girl (in a white dress).
The narrative jumps about quite randomly in ways that only make sense at the end of the film, and it's the end which saves this from being a poor experience. It's not quite on the high-end dread level as the climax of an otherwise quite dull Ringu (6/10) but it's spooky enough to be satisfying. On the other hand the ending reveal also made me chuckle a little, so not exactly scary.
The two main female actors are also very average, with the male character being an utterly pathetic figure: it's not quite clear how he was written, but I just wanted to punch him in the face.
Generally there's nothing memorable on offer here, tho' there could've been: the idea of polaroids showing us apparitions is a potentially fantastic concept, covered effectively by the Fatal Frame (Project Zero) series of games on the Playstation 2 console, which was very likely the source of inspiration for Shutter (tho' the game I believe used Camera Obscura). Speaking of Fatal Frame, a film was made last year, but seems very obscure:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3684484/
Back to Shutter: to be fair there is one nice scene which stands out: the photo-flip series showing the apparition moving towards something. Again it could've been so much more: if you've seen Paranormal Activity 4 and always thought they didn't maximise the potential of those X-Box Kinect lighting scenes, then you'll be thinking similar here.
Regarding the language: as ever, you should watch a film with its original audio as long as subs are available. The beginning is almost impossible to keep up with the quick-fire banter, but shortly afterwards it's fine. Thai sometimes has Korean-ish inflections, but mostly reminds you (if you, like me, have never heard Thai before) of Vietnamese.
Worth a watch if you're addicted to typical Asian horror and are interested in how Thailand does it.
Not worth your time if you're a horror fan looking for unique scares or original story.