A Thai box office juggernaut that has had two million viewers screaming and quivering in their seats, 4bia is set to scare up a storm on Indonesian screens with its quartet of otherworldly tales.

As the numerical pun of its title hints, 4bia consists of four yarns from four different directors including two who were behind the international smash horror hit Shutter.

It's inevitable in anthologies for viewers to draw comparisons between the parts -- there is always the best and the worst, plus one that is an unexpected surprise.

This anthology, however, is intended to function as a single story more than the sum of its parts, with characters in different segments cross-referencing each other.

Kicking off to an ominous start with the peculiarly-titled Happiness, the first episode tells of a young woman with an injured leg who has been confined to her apartment since a traffic accident three months before. When she receives an SMS from a stranger eager to make her acquaintance, she unwittingly strikes up a text conversation with him out of sheer loneliness.

This sets off an increasingly sinister chain of events which leaves the poor girl falling headlong into a claustrophobic nightmare.

Director Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, who has only helmed comedies like Iron Ladies previously, shows a natural flair for horror by skillfully constructing a terrifying situation out of such sparse elements (a person, a phone and a room). Another testament to his skill is that Happiness is almost entirely devoid of dialogue, effectively building its tension to fever pitch simply by allowing the audience to read the text messages on screen.

And a decent performance by actress Maneerat Kham-Uan that requires her to carry the whole story doesn't hurt either. If there were a slight fault to be found in Thongkontoon's section, it would only be that extra gore would have been more appropriate in the setting of its climax.

The weakest of the four parts is director Paween Purijitpanya's Tit For Tat, about a gang of high school bullies who beat up a classmate who tells on them for pot-smoking. Unbeknownst to them, the bullied classmate turns out to be a vengeful dabbler in the occult, possessing a book that spells doom to whoever sets eyes upon its cursed pages.

As opposed to the slow burning first segment, this tale of revenge is chock-full of attention-seeking scenes, complete with its jarring score, flashy deaths and mediocre acting.

An anticlimax from start to finish, Tit For Tat feels like a mishmash of ideas lifted from other films. The 'death always catches up with you' body count is strongly reminiscent of Final Destination and its amateurish CGI ghouls look like cheap knock offs from Pan's Labyrinth.

Ultimately, "Tit For Tat" feels like a silly stumbling block that dampens 4bia's impact.

Thankfully, 4bia returns back to form with its hilarious and occasionally creepy third part, In The Middle, by Banjong Pisanthanakun -- one half of the directing duo behind Shutter. Four guys are out camping in the woods and it's not long before they start telling ghost stories. There's a mention of ghosts loving to disturb whoever sleeps next to the tent opening and suddenly everyone starts squabbling over who gets to sleep in the middle.

To shut the others up, one of the campers says if he were to die that night, he would come back and haunt the one sleeping in the middle. When he goes missing the next day after a rafting accident (and presumed dead), the others start getting paranoid come bedtime.

While not exactly a scary horror flick perse, In The Middle is conceptually similar to Wes Craven's Scream in that it self-referentially skewers horror movie clich*s and turns the audience on their heads with plot twists, albeit with a distinctively Thai flavor.

In the first five minutes, In The Middle manages to give away the ending to its own director's previous film, name dropping The Sixth Sense and The Others to poke fun at the Thai film industry -- and even audaciously theorizes that perhaps Shutter plagiarized Titanic. Most importantly, it manages to get film buffs in the audience howling with laughter.

Maybe In The Middle isn't what one would expect to see in a horror anthology, but it's a pleasant surprise nevertheless and should signal director Banjong Pisanthanakun to do more comedy-horror hybrids in future.

Finally, 4bia saves the best for last with its closing chapter Last Fright. Pim is a flight attendant assigned to fly on a private flight for a princess from a neighboring country. Following a tension-filled journey that reveals a link between the two, the princess dies and a few days later, Pim is reassigned to fly the princess' body back to her country. When the body rolls off its seat during a bout of turbulence, Pim's flight of terror is merely beginning.

Featuring a bravura performance by Laila Boonyasak (Last Life In The Universe), Last Fright convincingly charts Pim's downward spiral from a calm, collected air stewardess to a frightened woman fighting back against an unearthly foe.

There are a couple of unintentionally funny moments when the grim-looking princess first appears on screen (she would look right at home in a Bangkok drag revue), and how comical a screaming, axe-wielding Pim looks when seen from the pilot's cockpit window point of view.

Apart from the shocks and scares peppered throughout the episode that are worthy of ten roller-coaster rides, the shocking last scene is a visceral horror that lingers long after the final credits have rolled.

Overall, despite its shortcomings in the second installment, 4bia is definitely a must-see addition in the Asian horror genre which also wisely veers away from the clich*d hirsute female ghost figure commonly found in its counterparts.

Those who have lost faith in Asian horror (with its tepid output of late, not to mention prolific but excruciatingly bad Indonesian horror films) should give this one a chance as it pretty much guarantees to make them scream bloody murder -- but in a good way.

4Bia is now showing with Indonesian subtitles at Blitz Megaplex.

Popular

Indonesia not affected by Southeast Asia-wide heat wave: BMKG

Residents fear for safety as Mount Ruang volcano erupts

In defense of Indonesian democracy