Brutal River (2005)

I think Anat Yuangngern first movie, the over-the-top Curse of the Sun was a very entertaining and ultra-violent action/horror-movie with zombie-gangsters and lots of cheesy and gory b-action. He tried to do something else with his next movie, Brutal River, and I can't say I'm impressed. Visually it's a nice movie, with classy cinematography and some okey actors, but Anat really fucked up the direction and editing. This true story (so they say anyway) about a killer-croc eating villagers could have been a lot of fun, but something went wrong. I think Anat just wanted to be serious after his last movie, and that was a big mistake.

The script, a very thin script I should say, follows the unlucky bastards that lives in small village in the Chumporn province. One day a crocodile (or alligator?) show up and starts to chew the actors and scenery. One by one some idiot is killed by the monster, fishermen, flirting boyfriends, the girlfriend of the new police, some old chef, two holy men and some other fools. Until they send for the military, who kills it. That's it, nothing more. There's no fun characters, not much gore, not much monster and too much romantic scenes in slow-motion. The bodycount is actually quite high, but everything is so lifeless.

So what went wrong? It's a god damn thai-movie with a killer-crocodile? Well, like I wrote above, Anat Yuangngern tries to be grown up and make something that will send him into the thai movie history. He failed so big! The good looking cinematography don't help at all, and the music is just annoying. Most of the croc-action is CG, which I don't mind at all and a few shots here and there are animatronics... but where's the gore? Where's the excitement? Not in this movie anyway.

But the worst thing, the thing that makes this movie really, really, really annoying is... the use of fade to black. I have NEVER seen a movie that uses fade to black so many times than this movie. It uses fade from black a couple of times to, but those fade to black... God, you just have to see it to believe it. There's so much fade to black that I thought I was going blind at least a couple of times during the movie!

No, this wasn't the brilliant silly killer croc-movie I wanted it to be, and it's nothing worse than a boring creature feature.