Phobia is a Passable Thai Anthology Film
Phobia(aka 4bia and See Prang) starts out with a bang only to decline slowly until it limps its way across the finish line.
Written by James “Crypticpsych” Lasome
November 21, 2010
Release: April 25, 2008 (Thailand)
Directed by: Yongyoot Thongkongtoon (“Happiness”), Paween Purikitpanya (“Tit for Tat”), Banjong Pisanthanakun (“In the Middle”), and Parkpoom Wongpoom (“The Last Flight”)
Written by: Yongyoot Thongkongtoon (“Happiness”), Paween Purikitpanya (“Tit for Tat”), Banjong Pisanthanakun (“In the Middle”), and Parkpoom Wongpoom (“The Last Flight”)
Starring:
Maneerat Kham-uan as Pin (“Happiness”)
Apinya Sakuljaroensuk as Pink (“Tit For Tat”)
Witawat Singlampong as Diaw (“Tit For Tat”)
Kantapat Permpoonpatcharasuk as Aey (“In The Middle”)
Laila Boonyasak as Pim (“The Last Flight”)
Phobia is a ghost-centric Thai horror anthology broken down into four parts, each directed and written by a different Thai director. The stories themselves are independent, but characters and events are mentioned in between stories if the viewer listens or looks carefully. Phobia proved so popular (highest grossing film at the Thai Box Office in 2008, in fact) that a sequel was made (Phobia 2 or Ha Phraeng) that would go on to, at the time, post the biggest Thai horror box office opening of any horror movie in Thailand to that point. But how’s the original look?
Phobia kicks off with “Happiness”, brought to us by Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, a director of action comedies and various alternative lifestyle films. In this short, done completely without dialogue, we meet Pin (Kham-uan), a lonely woman with a broken leg. One night, Pin receives a text message from a mysterious phone number and decides to strike up a 
text conversation with the person on the other side. At first, the conversations are friendly, if a little eerie, since the person is a complete stranger. As time goes on, however, Pin begins to discover she may be getting more than she bargained for.
How surprising it is that a director generally not known for horror gives by FAR the best short of the four! The lack of dialogue allows music and sound to amp up tension to the point where a vibrating cellphone is deafening and terrifying. Kham-uan also gives a fantastic performance, making the viewer care about, identify with, and be scared for her without her ever uttering a single word. Admittedly, the ending of this particular piece is fairly predictable in part, but it doesn’t stop the entire short from being reason enough to at least see this film.
The next segment of Phobia, “Tit for Tat”, comes to us from the director of the horror flick Body. Basically, it’s the archetypal story of bullying gone awry with a South Asian twist. A group of violent bullies kidnap someone as vengeance for being kicked out of school for being caught with weed because of him. As they beat the hell out of him in the bed of a speeding pick up truck (not kidding), they inadvertently cause him to fall out of the truck to his presumed death. Soon, they have to deal with the possibility that they picked the wrong kid to pick on and that he might have come back for vengeance.
While “Tit for Tat” is a step-down from the movie’s high point, it’s still pretty decent and fairly intense. The story develops a Final Destination-esque vibe as elaborate death sequences become the norm. The effects in these scenes are good when they’re practical, like in one of the earlier deaths or when Sakuljaroensuk’s character Pink tries to find a desperate way to save herself from punishment. It’s when they’re CGI that
the movie flies off the rails as the computer ghosts and spirits are abysmally bad. In addition, while the segment is still watchable, it IS unfortunately shot in that trendy quick-cut, music video style, which gets old REALLY fast.
In “In The Middle”, from one of the two directors of possibly the most famous Thai horror movie, Shutter, we get a self-referential horror comedy. In a nutshell, four guys go camping in the woods and tell ghost stories. The next day, they go rafting and inadvertently cause their raft to tip over. When one of the four gets back to camp well after the other three escape the water, the other three have to figure out whether their friend is really alive or if he is instead haunting them from beyond the grave.
Continuing the law of diminishing returns, “In The Middle” turns out to be only average at best. The four characters of this piece are tremendously annoying from the get-go, and the story they’re in takes FAR too long to get into its ghostly hijinks. Also, the script has an annoying tendency to name-drop other films (like Titanic, The Sixth Sense, and the director’s own Shutter). I also love, regarding that, that I found a massive plot hole most people miss, in that one of the characters professes to not knowing about The Sixth Sense or it’s ending … while wearing a shirt filled with movie spoilers one of which, of course, is The Sixth Sense. Admittedly though, this short does have a well-realized, excellent climax, great practical effects, and an ending that is genuinely intense. It’s just a very tough slog to GET to that point.
Finally, in “The Last Flight” (from the other director of Shutter), we meet up with Pim (Boonyasak), a flight attendant forced into working a flight with a foreign princess who requested a specific crew for her private voyage. As the story goes on, it becomes apparent that the Princess has something against her flight attendant and treats her like general garbage, spilling coffee on her, threatening her, and asking for HER meal rather than the one she specifically requested. When Pim takes it upon herself to exact a little vengeance, she inadvertently causes the Princess’s death and ends up forced into accompanying the body back to the princess’s homeland alone. Or maybe not so alone …
Unfortunately for Phobia, “The Last Flight” ends the film not with a bang, but with a very quiet whimper (or cough, really). Admittedly, the concept of a haunted “house” at 30,000 feet is original, but it’s not handled well here. Boonyasak’s Pim is trying so hard to make us feel her fear with screaming and fanatically over-the-top hysteria, but ghostly “coughing” 
just isn’t that scary and isn’t enough to shake the interminable boredom I felt throughout this segment’s climax. It’s also very difficult to actually identify with or like Pim given the connection to the Princess that’s revealed in the story or the fact that she blatantly disregards the warning about an allergy the Princess has and then gets SHOCKED that she dies!
So, in the end, what one has in Phobia is a fantastic opening that leads to a slow spiral downward in quality until it hits bottom in it’s final segment. That being said, that opening segment and what good points of the second and third stories there are are definitely enough to recommend at least giving this one a look.
3�Freak Heads (out of 5)
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