Unhuman
Director: Toranong Sricher
Stars: Sira Pathrat, Chollada Mekratree, Naravan
Niruthisai
Time: 108 minutes
Year: 2004
This film came as an unexpectedly enjoyable
gore-fest in which the director throws a little bit of everything into
a soup and stirs madly. It is not great filmmaking but you have to appreciate
the enthusiasm. These days it is so difficult finding legitimate horror
films from Thailand when ordering over the Internet – the DVD cover looks
intriguing and the premise seems decent and so you click “buy” – but the
vast majority of them are really poor grade straight to video dreck. I
put two films on prior to this one in trying to get a third review for
this page – the first one “Devil Species” looked like it was someone’s
vacation home video with a bunch of falangs having a picnic. I am sure
something terrible happened to them but I didn’t stick around to find out.
Next was “Haunted Dorm” – it’s one of those many Thai DVDs that extols
its 3-D capabilities – I guess it was mildly 3-D but five minutes into
it and I was bored to death with its cheap look and gave up on it. After
those two, “Unhuman” at least felt like a real movie with real ambitions.
It doesn’t start off promisingly. Five young 20-somethings
are up from Bangkok to visit the countryside to watch some meteor showers
that are scheduled to pass by later that night and I feared yet another
weak teen running around type of film ahead of me – but it goes off in
a completely different direction or directions that are fairly wild and
fun. One of the meteors crashes not far from them and strange things begin
happening soon afterwards. The military arrives and seals off the area
and the bloody remains of people begin to be discovered in the jungle.
There is also a research lab nearby and their workers begin vanishing or
showing up dead and the head of the company and his queen bitch right hand
lieutenant start leading hunting parties into the jungle to find whatever
is killing their people. The military sends a few squads into the jungle
as well as do the police along with those original five folks from Bangkok
and soon the jungle is littered with dead bodies.
Creatures are roaming the jungle – some looking
like gorillas, others like the creature from the black lagoon – with scales
and a long tail – others more like the predator – but what they have in
common is that they have a hunger – for human flesh – and the nearby village
is like a fast food restaurant. There are more organ removals than at an
Aztec sacrifice ceremony on a Friday night. Did they come from outer space
or are they somehow connected to the research lab. A female witch doctor
seems to gain control of them and sends them into a frenzy of killing and
it seems only a Buddhist priest and some virgin blood can stop her. The
queen bitch draws out some of the creatures by swimming nude in a pond
– attracting their primordial sexual urgings – and happily rips out the
heart of one of them. Throw in a big fire fight between the army and Burmese
rebels, some monster impregnation, a needed heart transplant and body parts
everywhere and you have some fairly trashy entertainment.
This clearly falls into B film territory in which
it appears that the director tries to bring in bits and pieces of many
of his favorite B movies. It has a solid budget though with nice sets and
a lot of folks running around getting killed. My only real complaint is
that whenever the monsters show up it tends to be dark or the director
plays with the speed or movement of the camera so that you never get a
really good look at them – whether this was to create a sense of danger
or simply because the cheapness of their costumes would have been obvious
I can’t say.
My rating for this film: 6.5