Spectacular poster artwork interested me in this one, and Art of the Devil (2004) has a reputation for its level of gore. Like the Thai slasher movie Scared, the film doesn't live up to the posters' promise, and the scenes depicted in the artwork don't quite appear that way in the film. But the film certainly is bloody...

The story concerns a young woman used and abused by her rich boyfriend - he pays her off but refuses to leave his family for her. After she is gang-raped by his friends, she takes her revenge on him and his family, by using Thai black magic, called 'the art of the devil'. It looks a lot like voodoo, involving straw mannikins and corpses... Soon, the family start dying off, by vomiting up sharp objects that spontaneously appear inside them...

The film is efficiently made, but lacks the edge needed to generate suspense or any real shocks. The ingredients are all there: a story with this many murders and ghosts of the undead should have been far more creepy. It certainly manages to be repulsive in several sequences, and there is a unique scene with the heroine flailing about in a roomful of eels. A lot of eels. Pity the actress, this hasn't been done with any CGI effects (like the similar scene in The Craft), they've just used just bucketloads of large eels.

So, Art of the Devil is memorable, in places - the cast, locations, budget, and FX are all amply sufficient, but the film doesn't quite work for me. I applaud any country's film industry that's so committed to a flourishing output of horror films, I'm just having trouble finding any of the same high calibre as the marvellously creepy Shutter.

A sequel, Art of the Devil 2 appeared at the Bangkok International Film Festival in February. It's been heralded with more fantastic promotional posters - already they're beckoning me to investigate if the sequel surpasses the original.