Seven members of a TV crew are on the way home after an assignment, when their mini van is torpedoed by a truck. When they step out of the van after the accident they suddenly find themselves in a strange place. A massive desolate wasteland. The sky is red and fires rage everywhere. Soon they are surrounded by wild men who capture them and lead them to a place where hundreds of people are being tortured, their guts ripped out, mouths filled with molten metal, bodies torn to bits and mutilated any which way. And then the truth dawns on them. They're in hell and now they must endure the final judgement...

I have no idea how this Thai horror movie fits into the big picture. I don't know if it was big in its home country, I don't know if the actors are popular or total unknowns and I have no idea if the Thai have a unique idea about what hell is, or if this film perfectly captures this vision.

The film opens with a series of scenes meant to provide some background information on the characters. Nice idea. Badly executed. The actors are terrible, and look genuinely uncomfortable every time there's a close-up, because the camera is shoved right into their faces. As they struggle to get their lines right, they look more like a community theater troupe than professional actors.

At the 20 minute mark the story shifts to hell and stays there for the remainder of the running time. The following 70 minutes is a series of increasingly repetitive and incoherent escape and evade scenes, where our doomed heroes travel from one cheap location to a another. A big fake looking cave. A forrest. A desert. Another cave. More desert. Everywhere they go they encounter more people who are being mutilated, and meanwhile they are being hunted by those big wild men.

You see, apparently hell is ruled by these big burly chaps who look like "Lord of the Rings" rejects, or perhaps extras from an early Terry Gilliam movie. They waddle around in iron clad harnesses and speak in strange language, and their leader appears to be king of The-Land-of-No-Lip-Sync. He sits on a big throne and yells things the subtitles won't even bother with.

So, why are our 7 heroes trapped in this post-modern version of hell? Maybe they need to repent their sins before they can move to the next level? Maybe they're not really dead? Maybe we just don't care.

To be fair, the film does look okay, not as cheap as you might think, and it does offer some very decent effects and a few cool torture shots. Whether this is enough to give up an hour and a half of your life is up to you. Personally I gave up on the film after 30 minutes, and the rest was just a slow descent into laughable madness. I think the scene that put the final nail in the coffin for me, was when two of our heroes attempt to rescue one of their friends. They must disguise themselves to escape detection, and how do they do this? Simple. One of them (the biggest one) dresses up as a woman, while the other tries to pass for a corpse, by talking the upper half of a dead guy and placing it on top of his head. The best part? They actually succeed...

David Bjerre
July 9, 2006

GALLERY