SYNOPSIS:
13 is a new and very secret competition offering
a grand prize of 100 million Baht. The contestants are chosen
from those most afflicted with problems involving work, money,
family and love. If they can complete 13 tasks, they'll receive
riches beyond their wildest dreams. But there's a catch...the
challenges will test them in every aspect of their lives from
love to religion and even moral values. They may seem undemanding
when they start but as they progress they become increasingly
more intense until finally, they reach a stage where they
are no longer sure if they are human anymore. As with every
game there are rules and these rules must be obeyed at all
times. If they fail even one of the tasks, they will be dismissed
from the game. The rules prohibit them from giving up from
telling anyone else that they are playing and from investigating
the origin of the game. A man named Phuchit is delighted to
be offered the chance to compete, little realizing that it
will cost him his friends, his family, his sanity and perhaps
even his life....
MOVIE REVIEW:
As much as this Thai movie looks like one of those senseless
horror flicks which the country is fondly churning out these
days, it is, mind you, actually worth your time. So much so
that it has won in two categories at the 2007 Thailand Film
Association Awards.
Picking
up the best actor award is Krissada Sukusol, who plays a out-of-luck
man who receives a mysterious call one day, telling him that
he can win 100 million baht if he completes 13 tasks. As absurd
as it sounds, when everything is not going your way, you’d
actually take up this bizarre challenge. Being a horror movie,
the mission begins getting out of hand, leading to some deadly
consequences.
Based
on a comic book, this 115-minute movie does manage to engage
the audience, given its interesting premise. Horror fans will
be reminded of the Saw and Hostel series, where games of torture
are played. But this Chookiat Sakveeraku-directed flick manages
to sustain quite a fair bit of our attention from the moment
the first challenge is executed. As the movie progresses,
some tasks may seem outright silly (check out the one where
the protagonist has to eat some dung-like delicacy in a Chinese
restaurant – the dish does look like what the Chinese
is capable of cooking up) and laughable (check out the one
where he has to carry a dead man out of an abandoned well
– the corpse is so fake-looking it made the whole scene
hilarious), but you’d be awaiting the next one to be
announced through the lead’s Nokia mobile phone.
Sukusol
clearly showcases his fine acting in this movie, playing a
demoralized man whose life cannot get any worse, and spiraling
downwards into further depression and wrongdoings. The anguish
and torment in the sunken eyes are so scarily real that it
made us wonder whether we miserable urbanites look like him
when we travel on the bustling streets of Singapore. The plot
goes eventually awry and culminates in a moralizing conclusion
where viewers are treated to a lesson on forgiveness and letting
go of the past.
At
the end of the day, there will be timid viewers who are frightened
by the shock tactics of the movie, but we don’t really
think much of the somewhat cheap-looking effects used in the
movie (think a broken rotten hand and a head sawed into two
which will make any self-respecting horror fan chuckle instead
of cringing in fear). Still, it clinched the Best Visual Effects
prize at the Thailand Film Association Awards: so you can
imagine how much worse off the other Thai horror flicks fare
in that department.
SPECIAL
FEATURES:
Like Colic, this Code 3 disc contains bonus features which
do not have any English subtitles – tsk tsk. There is
a “Trailer”, a 17-minute “Making
Of” (Sukusol is a really soft-spoken man in
our opinion) and a 2-minute “Deleted Scenes”
(the filmmakers had a commentary while the two leads talked
and talked in a life – in Thai of course).
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The
disc’s visual transfer isn’t crystal clear, but
is enough to have you figure out what’s happening in
the dark abandoned well, and is presented in its original
Thai soundtrack.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING:
Review
by John Li
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