Art of the Devil (2004) - Horror (Thailand)

Art of the Devil (2004) - "Khon len khong" - It is a complicated plot played out in different flashes of time. We start in the present and see Nan (Arisa Wills) running through the house in a panic. She as she finds her family in various levels of bloody distress she gets a call on the phone. The voice say its her sister in law that is doing this to get out of the house. Before she can though she is struck unconscious and bound by the killer sister in law. The actress Wills could be the Thai sister of Jessica Alba but this is her only appearance in film so I guess she does not have the acting chops of Alba. Still she is pleasant to look at. The sexy but evil Boom, the sister in law is played by Supakson Chaimongkol who you can find tons of pictures of on the Internet. She seems to be very popular in Thailand. In this pg-13 film though there is not a lot of either of these lovely ladies to look at and the film is not particularly remarkable. After the first scene we have flash backs as to how Boom became part of this family. She was picked up at a bar by the father of a family, not the one in the opening scene but another. This is not entirely clear at first but later you figure it out.

The guy is a bit of a dick head and even though married with two sons a daughter and a wife he picks up this young lady, Boom for a night of sex. No time is wasted to move on to the standard "Are you pregnant scene?" . Boom extorts a million baht from the father but he decides to keep seeing her and then figures since she just wanted money he could let his friend all have a turn on her. Well if that was not enough to piss her off towards revenge I don't know what is.

Then the strange deaths start happening, nails coming out of heads, suicides, we learn that it is the guys who raped Boom. The deaths seem sort of supernatural and when the family starts to die. The scene happens fast at the family house and the whole family is killed. Very hallucinatory and a bit freaky.

Boom figures as the mistress she can claim his estate with his heir. But before she can do that she has to appease the spirits of the family she just killed with black magic by visiting the priest and praying. When she comes out of the temple she sees the spirits of the dead in a passing vehicle and is struck by a car. While she is in the hospital another mistress of the Father comes forward with her three sons and daughter, who is Nan to claim his inheritance. Worse yet Boom loses her baby. Now the only way to get what she thinks is hers is to get into Nan's family through one of the brothers and then kill them all with black magic. Lucky for us the movie wastes no time and bang she is in. This is interspersed with some scenes of a reporter closing in on the black magic angle of the story.

Since this is done in flashback we sort of know where this is going to end up and a good part of the rest of the movie is the setup to the next murder scene. There is the little albino ghost of Boom's dead baby. For some reason she is a little girl and not a baby. There is little tension and I just have to say the Father was a real Ass, two families with children the same ages. Every now and again we flash back to the present with Nan bound and Boom explaining what we are seeing. Blah!

Nan closes in on the truth but of course we know by the beginning of the movie she will be too late to stop anything. We see that Boom gets pregnant again so there is nothing now to stop her from killing everyone. Her brothers are killed and then the house scene makes a reappearance. I will leave the climax for you to see in this barely NOT recommended movie.

Rating (4.8) 5.0 and up are recommended, In the Zombiegrrlz system I would say Skip it.