How about this for a quick review - “The Cadaver”
is dead on arrival. Sure that is cheap and obvious like a two-dollar cigar,
but unfortunately fairly accurate. Or maybe “The Cadaver” begins with some
mild promise but rigor mortis soon sets in for good. Or “The Cadaver” is a
lifeless and bloodless bloated mess. Ok – so none of those pithy comments
are likely to end up being used as blurbs in the ads or in the film reviewer’s
hall of fame but it is hard not to go down that mundane route with this rather
pointless and tedious horror film. It often feels like much of the output
in Thailand these days is in the horror genre and clearly most of their international
exposure comes from that direction with recent offerings such as “Shutter”
and “Art of the Devil 2” – but the vast majority of it is very derivative
and of straight to video quality. “The Cadaver” probably should have been
a straight to video production, but as it is produced by Thailand’s most
prestigious film company, Sahamongkol, it fought its way into the theaters
due to their industry clout. The production values are fairly low, the actors
are ineffective and the script feels like a patchwork job that becomes more
and more muddled as it goes along.
Somewhere in this glutinous mess was the kernel
of a good idea but somehow in the process the filmmakers got lazy and strayed
into TV like banality. Mai (Natthamonkarn Srinikornchot) is a medical student
and this year it’s time to dissect a cadaver. Along with her schoolmates and
friends she gets assigned her very own corpse to work with. It begins interestingly
as the students give this lifeless form their blessings and prayers and the
head lecturer tells them that the body they will be working on made this
their last wish – a final atonement and merit in their lives. One student
mentions that as long as they had their hands tied and a service performed
their souls have left their bodies – but of course a person who didn’t volunteer
to be dissected after death would still have their soul enclosed and an angry
soul it might be. No doubt if this had been a Hollywood production, the conversation
would have consisted of bodily function and necrophilia banter and so this
Thai approach was welcome.
As Mai comes into contact with her cadaver she
begins to have horrible nightmares and thinks she sees the body moving. Of
course, everyone believes that she is just spooked and imagining the entire
thing, but she begins to investigate the background of this cadaver and discovers
that she was a young student as well who simply disappeared one day. At this
point the film begins to disintegrate into a tiresome mess as the body ties
into something that Mai was involved in previously with her professor (Nirut
Sirichanya) and it quickly loses any tension and goodwill that it had engendered
till then. It’s a shame because there are few things that creep me out more
than cadavers, dissection and morgues, but this film leaves all that morbid
atmosphere behind as it becomes a murder mystery of sorts. Also, left behind
in the plot are the friends and other parts that in the first half of the
film one assumed would be important – such as the mysterious upstairs neighbor
Noi who ends up playing no discernable part.
It really feels as if someone wrote the first section but had to move on to another project and handed the script over to someone else who just wanted to finish it as quickly as possible and didn’t worry about where the film seemed to be heading. Most of the few scares are your basic jolting noises and sudden movement scenes with no gore what so ever. The cinematographer seemed to think that as long as the scenes were dark they would be scary and so nearly the entire film is shot in murky gloom and all I wanted to do was shout for someone to please turn on the lights. I mean if I thought I was being haunted by a ghost I would have every light in the house on but Mai prefers keeping it dark – or maybe she was just being energy conscious! There is just nothing here to recommend this one.
My rating for this film: 5.0