The Letters Of Deathhas everything you would expect from an Asian horror flick, which is exactly why it’s such an immaculate flop.

The film, directed by Kapon Thongphlap, is horrendously predictable, so much that there’s hardly anything you have yet to see in a recent horror film – a curse and retribution theme, death threat letters (as the title bluntly suggests), what seems like an unsolvable mystery, a collection of victims, with the typical few who refuse to come to terms with the danger they are facing, and a couple of unexplainable deaths, which stir up fear and seriousness towards the death threats.

Newcomers Mahasamut Boonyaruk and Chonlada Mekratree play Seree and Nattaya, 2 members of an assembly of ex-high school classmates, who meet again during their 10-year reunion dinner. Terror seizes them when Chaiwat (Treepon Promsuwan), one of the classmates, suddenly dies the next day, leaving behind a disk containing information of the death chain that will spread among the class should they fail to solve a mystery.

Concurrently, the rest of the classmates receive letters, each inclusive of an unsolved hangman game with a red stroke on a large space; a stroke, which Seree and Nattaya finds out, after running through the contents of the disk, represents the death of the first member of their class and is the first, which forms the classic figure of a hangman.

As the film progresses, we are introduced through a flashback to a new character, Wan, a new classmate back then whom Seree befriended. But everyone else despised him and even hideously bullied to a point where he was disfigured and out of school with a joke played too far.

With this recollection comes the memory of how Wan adored playing the hangman game. Seree realises that the solution to the game is Wan’s name. But what everyone failed to realise all this while was that ‘Wan’ was just a nickname for their then “new” classmate. Nobody knew what his real name was. Not even Seree. Thus, the search for the solution to the hangman game begins.

As it seems, Thailand is currently the most active contributor among Asian countries in the horror film industry, offering such movies one after another in recent years. It’s such an unfortunate case then, that besides films like Shutter (2004) and Ghost of Mae Nak (2005), most of these Thai horrors are actually painfully dreadful in one way or another, and The Letters Of Death is no exception. Besides straying away from what seems like a Thai tradition of generic ghost themes, the plot for the film has barely any original substance.

The fact that the death scenes are infuriatingly and frustratingly predictable with the giveaway lead ups to each of them, the clichéd methods through which the characters die – drowning in a bathtub, getting caught in factory equipment or machines, being stuck in an elevator gone crazy – the hideous translation under the subtitles, and the awfully fake visuals in numerous scenes, just slaughters the whole experience of a suspenseful horror flick. And Thongphlap’s obvious attempts to be sophisticated with certain shots, angles and lines, which ends up being ridiculous, doesn’t help a tad.

The cinematography is hardly impressive and the acting mediocre, to the extent that in most of the scenes, we are driven to find meagre consolation in the fact that the actors are physically attractive or hot.

Plus, with the rather large number of characters involved, and with the first death taking place less than 15 minutes into the story, it becomes really difficult to care about or connect with any of them, knowing that most of them are going to die. In fact, it’s a chore to.

On the other hand, what worked to the director’s favour was how, despite its unoriginal plot, the film has a gripping pace overall, with a fine establishment of suspense in its killer opening scene and the clever use of lightings and audio and visual stimulation to enhance the suspenseful atmosphere, which somehow draws and maintains viewers interest.

Still, The Letters Of Death is only worth watching for the sake of killing time, and definitely not if you have slightly less than $10 to spare, or if you’re looking for a good scare or jolt because it completely fails in that division.

It doesn’t take a fan of horror flicks to tell that this film is nothing short of amateurish. In fact, the idea of wasting money for a horror film, just to be frightened out of your seat is immature and ridiculous enough a concept. But this film pushes the bucket even further than that with its annoying incompetence to leave you even subtly red with fear.

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Movie Details
Opens: Apr 19
Runtime: 95 min
Language: Thai
Cast: Mahasamut Boonyaruk, Chonlada Mekratree, Andy Kempimok
Director: Kapon Thongphlap

Photos courtesy of Golden Village.